Reviews
In this section you'll find a small selection of reviews of 'Heavenly Creatures'. We'll start with one where the reviewer is accompanied by a former classmate of Pauline and Juliet...Sensibilities shaken by NZ's latest
Heavenly Creatures (M). At Greater Union Capitol 3, Manuka.****
Is the New Zealand film industry on a roll?
'Once Were Warriors' is a worldclass work by any measure. And now, along comes Peter Jackson's account of a murder that made world headlines in 1954, an account that uses contemporary sources and mostly meticulous research to discover the pathway to that dreadful day in the lives of two teenaged schoolgirls when together they whacked the mother of one of them many times about the skull with half a house brick wrapped in a lisle stocking.
I watched Heavenly Creatures in the company of a senior Canberra journalist whose character does not appear in the film but was in the same High School class as Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, like them was able to avoid PE and thus managed to acquire a close understanding of both, reinforced by subsequent visits to Pauline in prison. Her judgment is that while the school never sang 'Just a Closer Walk with Thee' for morning hymns, and while the details of classroom events may have been heightened for filmic reasons, Jackson had pretty completely got the story's atmosphere as right as his telling of it (in collaboration with Frances Walsh).
The Parker/Hulme story could have happened in any city in any country, though more likely in one with a British heritage. It was fate that it happened in Christchurch during an era when the community presented a face of respectability concealing a more normal set of tensions and behaviours that were less so.
This dichotomy influenced events after the murder more profoundly than those leading up to it, but the difference was relative.
Pauline and Juliet were outsiders at the school among daughters of upper-class homes, Pauline from a lower-middle-class home in the school's catchment, Juliet newly arrived from overseas, the only child of an academic family. Probably, they would have had unremarkable lives if they had never met. Together, they developed a shared folly that determined the course of events. Each bore a resentment that the other's presence could ease.
Much has been made of the possibility of a lesbian relationship. At that time, this was the love that dare not speak its name, still concealed behind Queen Victoria's dictum that it never existed. Only the two women know the truth of it. The film implies a physical closeness, taking baths together, finding comfort from cuddling when Pauline slept over at Juliet's home, one occasion when they undressed for that.
But the substance of the drama more suggests that although they were both at the apex of their biological transformation into young women, neither had any great awareness of her own sexuality despite Pauline's horror at the discovery of her parents' never having married and Juliet's at the revelation that her mother was having an affair with a man invited to stay in the Hulme house while recovering from TB, from which Juliet also suffered. Pauline did have a sexual relationship with a young man, although the film's depiction of it strongly suggests it was more to spite her parents than out of any passion.
More significant was the capacity that each had for journeys into the realm of fantasy. Juliet wrote stories. Pauline kept a diary in which she articulated her fantasies, and which was later to be damning evidence in court.
They both had some skill at making plasticine models, which Jackson has used as the basis for some marvellous sequences in which fantasy and reality combine to develop the madness that infected them.
It's all very real, the way that Jackson has brought it to the screen. Melanie Lynskey in her debut performance was a brilliant choice to play Pauline, both reflecting her physical qualities and delivering the character with frightening and heartbreaking intensity. The more experienced Kate Winslet as Juliet has a more difficult task because the character was influenced by more subtle factors, but hers too is a cracking performance. As Pauline's mother, the victim, Sarah Pierse is memorable, as is Diana Kent as Mrs Hulme.
Heavenly Creatures is an intensely discomforting film because of its content. My source of information came away from it trembling and gravely in need of a whisky. Your response may not be as profound, but be in no doubt that it is a film with the power to grasp and shake the sensibilities, no less, perhaps even more, now than when it was a cause celebre in the world's media.
- DOUGAL MACDONALD
Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995), Saturday 28 January 1995, page 47
Washington Post
By Desson HoweWashington Post Staff Writer
November 25, 1994
“Heavenly Creatures” lets you in on its terrible secret right away. In the opening scene of this compelling New Zealand drama, two teenage girls—covered in blood—are seen racing through a wooded area in a hysterical panic. The sequence ends abruptly and isn’t returned to until the finale. But it hangs over everything like a sword of Damocles as this hypnotic saga of adolescent obsession, innocence and murder unfolds.
Most New Zealanders are familiar with the real story behind “Heavenly Creatures.” In the 1950s, schoolgirls Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were brought up before the Christchurch authorities for the murder of Pauline’s mother. After undergoing a tabloid-stoked circus trial, the girls were ordered never to see each other again. It was the ultimate parental punishment, doled out by a judicial body.
Informed by court transcripts of the period, interviews with key witnesses and the extensive diaries Parker kept, filmmaker Peter Jackson observes events solely from the girls’ fantasy-based point of view. “Heavenly Creatures” has the unsettling appearance of having been created by the girls themselves. It’s a pathologically autobiographical fairy tale.
In the movie, subdued ninth-grader Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) experiences a transformation when perky English student Juliet (Kate Winslet) enters her repressive girls school. Juliet’s intelligent, exuberant air—she begins by correcting her French teacher in matters of grammar—marks her as a rebel. When the two girls regularly sit out gym class (Juliet for tubercular ill health and Pauline as the result of childhood operations on her leg), they’re bonded forever.
Realizing they have mutual interests as writers, the girls invent their own fantasy universe, where medieval characters live in a mythical kingdom called Borovnia. The girls giddily create stories of sexual escapades and murderous revenge, even giving each other fictional names. Inevitably, their private relationship provokes misunderstanding, resentment and growing resistance from their elders. When Juliet’s divorcing parents decide it’s time to ship their ailing daughter to her aunt in South Africa, the friends make plans to live abroad together. And when Pauline’s mother rejects her daughter’s request to follow Juliet, everyone’s macabre destiny is sealed.
Jackson (who wrote the script with Frances Walsh) evokes the girls’ fantasy world with scenes featuring plasticene figures, creating an eerie, metaphysical dimension to the movie. There is simply no way to dispute Borovnia’s existence. It’s there—in living animation—right in front of you. But all the clay-kneading in the world would be useless without believable human performances. Diana Kent (as Juliet’s mother), Sarah Peirse and Simon O’Connor (Pauline’s parents) are appropriately bewildered and understandable in their distanced adult roles. But the best of all comes from the central duo. As Juliet, Winslet is a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in. She’s offset perfectly by Lynskey, whose quietly smoldering Pauline completes the delicate, dangerous partnership. Their bond is so strong, all attempts to destroy it are as awesomely foolhardy as splitting the atom.
Roger Ebert
By Roger EbertNew Zealand was stunned in 1952 by a brutal murder carried out by two girls, ages 15 and 16, who crushed the skull of one of their mothers with a rock. It was whispered at the time that the girls had a lesbian relationship; but since almost everyone involved, including the girls, knew very little about what that might entail, the subject was suppressed. Tried and sentenced, the girls served five years in prison before being paroled on the condition that they never see each other again.
Their story, based on facts but interpreted with a great deal of freedom, is the inspiration for "Heavenly Creatures," a new film by Peter Jackson. The film would be remarkable anyway, but it comes with a footnote attached: One of the girls, Juliet Hulme, has recently been identified as Anne Perry, the best-selling British crime novelist. Watching her on the "Today" program, talking forthrightly about the events of 40 years ago, I got the impression of a sensible, thoughtful woman for whom the murder is as much an enigma as for everyone else.
The movie shows the crime as resulting from a tragic confluence of coincidences: Two girls, both emotionally unstable in just the right way to complement each other's weaknesses, are outsiders in a Christchurch girls' school. They become fast friends, bound by a fascination for the macabre. Simple, stolid Pauline is dazzled by Juliet, who thinks nothing of correcting the French teacher. But Pauline has status in Juliet's eyes, too, not least because of a scar on her leg, after an operation for bone disease: "All the best people have had chest and bone disease! It's all frightfully romantic!"
Almost everything is frightfully romantic in the lives of these girls, who become inseparable, sharing crushes on the tenor Mario Lanza and such movie stars as Orson Welles. They become intoxicated by their friendship, rushing headlong everywhere, with squeals and giggles, giddy with delight at the private world they are creating. Their parents are out of the loop - especially Juliet's mother, a psychologist who is much more concerned with proving her own fading sexuality than with communicating with her daughter.
The girls are separated when one contracts tuberculosis. They begin to write each other long, detailed letters about the events in an imaginary country they have created, with dream castles and heroic figures with which they identify. Jackson uses fantasy sequences to make this world as real for us as it is to the girls, who inhabit it as an alternative to the daily lives they find dreary.
Adults grow disturbed by the closeness of the girls; lesbianism is suspected by people for whom the very word cannot be spoken. Indeed we can see, in awkward little scenes in which they wrestle together or exchange "accidental" kisses, that there is a strong bond between Juliet and Pauline, but whether it is homosexual or asexual is not for anyone in this movie to ask, or understand. In any event, it is decided the girls "see too much" of each other, and would "benefit by a change," and in terror at being separated the girls plan and carry out a horrible murder.
Casting is a delicate matter in telling a story like this, and in Melanie Lynskey as Pauline and Kate Winslet as Juliet, Jackson has found the right two actresses. There is a way Lynskey has of looking up from beneath glowering eyebrows that lets you know her insides are churning. And Juliet, superficially so "bright" and normal, laughs too much, agrees too quickly, always exists just this side of hysteria.
The insight of "Heavenly Creatures" is that sometimes people are capable of committing acts together that they could not commit by themselves. A mob can be as small as two persons. Reading in the paper recently about a crowd of teenage boys who beat an innocent youth to death, I was reminded of this film. Sometimes tragedies happen because each person is waiting for someone else to say "no!"
In the case of Pauline and Juliet, that truth is complicated by their own emotional maladjustments. What makes Jackson's film enthralling and frightening is the way it shows these two unhappy girls, creating an alternative world so safe and attractive they thought it was worth killing for.
Date of publication: 11/23/1994