The Lovely Bones

There will most likely be much speculation this week among critics and audiences about Peter Jackson’s new film The Lovely Bones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Jackson and for Paramount, most of that speculation will probably be along the lines of “how?” and “why?”  The film, written by Jackson with Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens from the best selling novel by Alice Sebold, is less of a bad film than an irretrievably misconceived one.  When he has good material to work with, Jackson is quite a director, (one need look no further than The Lord of the Rings trilogy or Heavenly Creatures for proof) but with The Lovely Bones, Jackson has delivered a structurally deflated, emotionally overwrought, and often digitally cartoonish film that offers only a few well crafted suspenseful and human moments.

Set in 1973 Chester County, Pennsylvania, the film tells the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) a blossoming 14 year old who is murdered on her way home from school.  Stuck in a blissful interzone between heaven and earth, Susie is unwilling to pass on into heaven before her murder is solved, but she is unable to make contact with her family on earth.  She watches as her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) begin to realize that neighbor George Harvey (Stanly Tucci) is responsible for the crime.

From this premise Jackson has fashioned two worlds, the physically rigid world of 1973 suburbia, and the indistinct emotional near heaven that Susie inhabits. These two areas are distinct in both visual and narrative style, and yet the story demands that they begin to interact once their divergent qualities are established.  There is nothing wrong with this in theory or practice.  Many films have succeeded in balancing narratives that transition between life and the afterlife.  From Angel on My Shoulder and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (both 1946) to Ghost (1990) and Defending Your Life (1991) filmmakers have explored hypothetical realms beyond the confines of physical life.  In each of these films, much of the entertainment is derived from dead characters identifying and adapting to the rules of the afterlife and discovering how to work through the afterlife toward a resolution in the real world. In The Lovely Bones there is no immediacy in Susie’s afterlife, and there is no dramatic link that Susie can establish with the real world. She is able to leave impressions, but she does not learn to communicate or influence events, and therefore she becomes an entirely passive and purely emotional player in her own story.

The problems with the connection between life and the afterlife are more than just narrative.  The digital afterlife, crafted at Jackson’s Weta special effects studio, with its ultra saturated colors and shifting landscape, looks more like an expensive screen saver than a non physical, emotionally structured dreamscape.  The images that drift in and out of this realm are emotional symbols and idealized nostalgic images that become quickly tiresome.  One begins to feel truly bad for Saoirse Ronan, not because of the predicament of her character, but because she’s an excellent young actress stuck in a realm of anti cinema with nothing to do.

Jackson fares far better in the real world.  Many of the scenes of 1970’s suburbia pop with an urgency and physicality that is severely lacking in the afterlife. Stanly Tucci is passively terrifying in his role as an inconspicuous serial murderer, and scenes between him and Ronan, as well as a particularly suspenseful sequence in his house with Rose McIver, are the best parts of the film.  In these scenes Jackson shows that he is a master at constructing action, suspense, and atmosphere with visual efficiency and innovation. Susan Sarandon makes an appearance as a gleefully alcoholic and provocative grandmother, and the little humor that she brings to the film is fleeting, and somewhat out of place in a movie about a family trying to recover from the murder of an oldest daughter. Sarandon does supply some stylized humanity, which along with Tucci, is happily reminiscent of Jackson’s pre Lord of the Rings work.

The film never becomes a satisfying narrative, nor does it become a fascinating stylistic endeavor.  The disparate elements of the film veer too far away from each other, and in the end they are only connected by emotion that is so direct and so overwrought that their ties become unbelievable, even in fantasy.

                                          Thaddeus Ruzicka