The Lovely Bones (2010)

In 1994, several years before he dove head-first into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and created perhaps the greatest film trilogy of all time, director Peter Jackson impressed international critics and audiences with Heavenly Creatures, a visually stunning depiction of the most infamous murder in New Zealand’s history. After the epic scale of The Lord Of The Rings and the excesses of his King Kong remake, Jackson has returned to his roots to deliver another murder tale laden with fanciful imagery, The Lovely Bones. Unlike Heavenly Creatures, The Lovely Bones is based on a work of fiction, but it shares the former film’s strong attention to period details and its reality-based human drama.

It’s 1973 in suburban Pennsylvania, and 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan from Atonement) is a typically awkward teenage girl, moony-eyed over the cute English boy at her school, sweetly devoted to her loving father Jack (Mark Wahlberg), and a budding photographer thanks to the 110 Instamatic camera (complete with flashcubes and 24 rolls of film) she received for her birthday. Everything about her life is familiar and relatively typical — until the day she is murdered by George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), an older man living alone in a house right down the street. Susie’s body is not found, only the knitted hat her mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz), made for her, along with a lot of blood.

Harvey is interviewed by a detective (Michael Imperioli) canvassing the neighborhood, but the cop overlooks a piece of evidence in plain sight that Harvey forgot to hide, so he’s in the clear for now. As for the remaining Salmon family, they’re now living in a sort of limbo; they don’t know exactly what happened to Susie, and they find different ways of coping with the tragedy of her disappearance. Abigail closes off Susie’s room and closes herself off from her husband; Jack grows angry at the lack of progress in the investigation and urges the cops to look into numerous possible suspects from the neighborhood by proclaiming his wild accusations and suspicions without any real evidence. Eventually, Jack calls in Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon in an odd comic-relief role) to take care of their home, which increases the friction in Jack and Abigail’s marriage.

Meanwhile, Susie is also trapped in limbo of a more literal type. Surrounded at first by ghostly, unpopulated shadows of her former life, she moves through a dazzling world of symbolic imagery, encouraged by a strange young girl who calls herself “Holly Golightly” and who tells Susie she’s on her way to heaven, but isn’t there just yet. It’s a weird and difficult journey for Susie because she’s still looking back, trying to communicate her love to her father and to the boy she wanted to kiss, hoping for justice for her killer, and unwilling to let go of her former corporeal existence.

I never read the best-selling Alice Sebold novel on which this movie is based, so I cannot attest to its faithfulness in the page-to-screen transition. But this film feels out of balance. The scenes of Susie in the “in-between” (as her younger brother labels it) are filled with amazing, eye-popping visual effects, as one might expect from Peter Jackson. But there’s so much screen time devoted to these symbol-filled afterlife scenes that they overwhelm the film and detract from the more compelling details of the murder’s impact and aftermath. Whether or not this imbalance is a true reflection of the novel, I cannot say. But it does not compare favorably to Heavenly Creatures, in which the fantasy sequences and visual effects did not dominate the film but were important illustrations of the private lives of the two central characters, enhancing the story without distracting from it.

By contrast, The Lovely Bones spends so much time on Susie’s otherworldly existence that nearly every other character gets short shrift in the process. Mark Wahlberg plays the devoted and anguished father well, but Rachel Weisz nearly sleepwalks through her role, and Susan Sarandon only demonstrates her proclivity for smoking and wearing garish 1970s clothing and hairstyles. There’s precious little screen time devoted to this tragedy-stricken family’s interrelationships and emotional motivations, so their actions at times seem disjointed and illogical. Susie’s older sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver), shows some signs of life in the second half of the movie, but by then it’s too little too late. Michael Imperioli’s cop character is virtually a cardboard cutout, and even Stanley Tucci seems hesitant and soft-pedaled in his portrayal of the murderer. These drawbacks make the film much less emotionally engaging for the audience than such subject matter would normally generate.

It would be wrong to trash this film entirely, as it does include a few admirable qualities. Besides the noteworthy, if overindulgent, special effects, The Lovely Bones features some great period costumes and a marvelous score by Brian Eno, who interpolates several tracks from his classic albums of the early ’70s. And there’s no doubt that Peter Jackson is highly accomplished at directing a wide variety of actors, working with groundbreaking visuals, and the craft of editing. With this film, however, Jackson and his screenwriting partners missed the mark by forsaking the story’s emotional core for the sake of big-screen visual splendors, turning what could’ve been a compelling drama into a cold, intellectual exercise.