HEAVENLY CREATURES Reviewed, And Lost Media

  The first thing going through my head while watching "Heavenly Creatures" is... why was it this hard to watch "Heavenly Creatures"?? This is an Oscar nominated, Venice Film Festival prize winning film. Released in 1994, it was the mainstream breakthrough for bona fide A-list director and Mr. Lord Of The Rings, Peter Jackson, as well as the debuts for Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet. On paper, that is more than enough names for a film to get DVD distribution. And yet! The thing isn't available to stream anywhere, or buy/rent digitally anywhere, and Blu-ray and DVD discs are functionally out of print. DVDs are reasonably available on eBay, but Blu-rays are not and will probably run you upwards of $50. Why exactly this is, is not super clear to me. Yes, it's a Miramax film that got edited for American release, same as the similarly unavailable "Velvet Goldmine". But there are plenty of Miramax films that are in circulation. Even some of the notoriously cut down and temporarily lost Miramax projects, like "54", are buyable thru Amazon or iTunes or even watchable on HBO for a few months. As best as I can tell, Paramount is theoretically the rightsholder for 90s Miramax films, and currently hosts quite a few on Paramount+. Surely these films are more valuable to Paramount either on their streaming service or being rented out to another for a fee than they are being locked up in a vault.

 Anyways, the final outcome is I bought a Korean copy of the movie on eBay. I have no clue if it's "real" or a bootleg, but the disc played fine, the picture looked better than some definitely authentic DVDs of 90s films I own, and I could set the subtitles to 'none'. So shoutout to Entertainment Enterprises, the company listed on the box that doesn't seem to exist when I google it.

 The second thing going through your head will probably be how obviously directed by Peter Jackson the film is. There's plenty of fascinating things going on with the story, which I'll get to in a minute, but I found myself regularly stunned by some of the choices made in how the thing was shot. The first moment to drop my jaw was a shot of Kate Winslet in a regal dress in the woods. It's lit with an artificial glow, telling us that Lynskey's character idolizes Winslet, and wow does it look a lot like the kind of shots that made Lord Of The Rings a phenomenon. The movie is full of lighting that most directors would be scared to do in an outdoor scene, because it looks too phony, but the blending of dark murder drama and fantasy is precisely the point here. Of course that extends to creatures. Paula (Lynskey) and Julie (Winslet) escape from their families into a fantasy world, which is fully realized with clay people acting as sort of idealized versions of the people in their lives. I can't say the CGI of this low budget 1994 drama looks stellar, but the costumes of the clay people definitely do. Another jaw drop is a sex scene between Paula and a (slightly older?) boy, which shifts back and forth between the fantasy world and the real world. It's a positively bananas visual that is also positively filled with meaning: without anyone actually saying it, we know that Paula's parents are right about her being a child not mature enough for those relations. Some of the fantasy elements are a bit less convincing, I thought the Orson Welles portion added nothing, but there's so much craft and creativity on display that it's easy to fall in love with the 80% of it that works.

 In its funky way, that link of fantasy worlds and adult maturity is what makes the story click. See, "Heavenly Creatures" is based on real murders, which I gather is extremely well-known and obvious in New Zealand. You can't tell this story in the straightforward fashion of teen lesbian lovers murdering their disapproving mom, because that kind of wish fulfillment works in the movies but not in real life, where murder is not cool. And portraying the girls as evil makes for a one dimensional and probably quite cruel story. So Jackson and life partner/co-writer Fran Walsh, who was the driving force behind this movie based on the Wikipedia history, give us two young women who blur the line between whimsical fun and a genuinely scary refusal to engage with reality - not that different from any group of teenagers. The girls' friendship is delightful to watch unfold; the script is quite funny, which Peter Jackson's films after this one rarely were, and Kate Winslet gives her role the right amount of theater kid energy to make the humor work. An interesting aspect that's well developed without being directly said is that Julie's fantasy is an ultra-romantic life of publishing fantasy books and living in Hollywood, while Paula's fantasy is really just living Julie's current life with her. Julie is rich and well-travelled and not ever satisfied with those things as she keeps her head in the clouds. Paula is... envious? awed by? the wealth and the life experience. Even at the time of the murder, when the girls both truly hate their own parents, they both seem to think the other's parents are nice folks, even though we know their parents have been conspiring with each other the whole time. These characters are both specific, interesting people. The actual "plot", of two young people who take revenge on their parents for forbidding their love, is standard stuff at its core, but it's all the flourishes around it that make "Heavenly Creatures" sing. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐