Even when he hardly had the resources to do so, Peter Jackson has always been a trafficker in fantasy. Whether outlining the boundaries of a fantastic world (as he did in the Lord of the Rings trilogy) or detailing the trauma of bringing one of its inhabitants into our own (King Kong), the primary relationship of any of his films is of Jackson and the imagined, with the viewer often acting as something of a home-wrecking third party. But only once did Jackson take a really serious look at that relationship, and show with terrible clarity just how corrupting it can be. Just as Hitchcock's Vertigo provided an inverted prism to look at the master's obsessions, Heavenly Creatures is Jackson's rawest, most exciting, and most vital work, shedding a whole new light on everything that the man has done before and since.
Like many directors inclined to the fantastic, Jackson found some of his most fertile stomping ground in youth; here, in the true story of Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), two teenagers accused of killing Pauline's mother in Christchurch, New Zealand in the mid-1950s. The case caused a sensation at the time, but Jackson's interested in none of that; he starts with the murder, then leaps back to the beginning, when Pauline and Juliet initially met in their conservative school. Working from Pauline's actual diaries, he fills in the rest with elaborate realizations of the girl's shared fantasies, complete with clay figures, medieval castles, and the haunting figure of Orson Welles standing in as incomplete and muddy metaphors for their own lives.
On its face, it's hard to understand why Juliet and Pauline thought that killing Honora Parker Rieper (Sarah Peirse) would solve any of their problems. Neither of them was an accomplished criminal, and they certainly had no chance of travelling anywhere in the world that would have been accepting of their lesbian relationship. Heavenly Creatures doesn't get very far in trying to explain that, but anyone who's ever been a teenager should understand that logic often supplicates in the face of sheer, overwhelming ectasy, especially when unhindered by the maturity that recognizes teenage crushes don't always last forever.
This ectasy, and its gradual but persistent devolution into outright madness, is realized with a sensuousness and hurricane force that is comparable to perhaps no other film ever made. Jackson’s style is frenetic (and never more so than here), exhibiting visual and sonic ideas seemingly as fast as his creative team could conceive them. It’s not unknown for a teenage romance to blossom in the space of a montage; it’s another thing entirely for it to employ airplane sounds to emphasize motion, or for the characters to burst into the song playing on the soundtrack without referencing Busby Berkeley. As time goes on, and figures outside of the ‘Fourth World’ (you know, real people) become less distinct, the tenor only increases, before finally coming to a crescendo of jester hats and mood lighting where all connection to the outside world is finally obscured beyond recognition. This approach may never satisfy either psychologists or criminologists, all the more so because it gives no recourse to prevent it.
The sweetness of their first dalliances is, of course, tempered by the knowledge that by the end the two of them will be made unforgivable for their love, rather than redeemed by it, and that they are unable to break away from one awful truth: there is no such thing as a shared fantasy. Through their submission to each other, both Juliet and Pauline end up alone and stranded in Borovnia. Whether or not Jackson can identify with this level of immersion can only be inferred, but it is a compelling enough portrait of world-makers to suggest that a beastly, broken heart beats inside Middle Earth, one that has only found comfort in a world that it has made for itself.
SPECIAL FEATURES
There are, alas, still disappointingly few special features (only trailers), but the transfer is absolutely stunning. Having owned this in two formats previously, I can say that this is easily the best that this film has ever looked, and that the widescreen version (long unavailable) enhances what was already very impressive.
"Heavenly Creatures" is on sale December 13, 2011 and is not rated. Directed by Peter Jackson. Starring Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison.
