A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.
These days Heavenly Creatures is primarily remembered for having the first featured role for Kate Winslet and being the first film that really put director Peter Jackson on the map, and that's truly a shame because the film is a dark, gorgeous, achingly real story about adolescent and female friendship, isolation and loneliness, and obsession and its cost. The film is based on the tragic real life 1950's story of social misfit fourteen year old Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) who found a kindred spirit in the far more upwardly mobile new student Juliet Hulme (Winslet). In her own way, Juliet is misunderstood, overlooked by her globe-trotting, detached parents, who are barely keeping their marriage from falling apart. The film uses its period setting to show how social constrictions slowly suffocate the growing affection between the two, and how it in turn causes them to escape into a dream world of their own making, beautifully portrayed through some nifty special effects. Their relationship is all very "innocent", as their parents put it, but the more societal pressures and their, mostly, well-meaning, parents push back the more they become invested in the relationship and shut out the rest of the world, ultimately to devastating effect (hinted at from the film's great opening moments that parallel the tragic reality of events with the fantasy world the two girls so desperately wish to be real). Jackson's direction is energetic but it's also great at conveying huge amounts of information through simple but inventive compositions, such as a number of montages that illuminate the growing relationship and demonstrate what each one of them is getting out of the bond. Pauline is more immediately infatuated while Juliet just wants someone who agrees with her opinions and notices her without expectations. The playfulness of the first third of the film slowly shifts as Jackson and Fran Walsh's great script pays attention to the contradictions between the girls' perceptions and the life around them, exposing the hypocrisies of their parents while also recognizing the lack of maturity of the two teens but also the earnestness and value of their relationship. It's a hauntingly beautiful film; tragic and heartbreaking not just for its ultimate consequences but even more due to how all of it could have been avoided.
Grade: ★★★★
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