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The Lovely Bones (2010)

Director: Peter Jackson

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From Time Out Online

Let nobody say that Peter Jackson doesn’t like a challenge. After filming Tolkien’s three ‘The Lord of the Rings’ books and spending over $200 million on a new three-hour version of ‘King Kong’, the New Zealand director who started out making splatter horror in the late 1980s has turned to Alice Sebold’s hugely popular ‘The Lovely Bones’, the 1970s-set American novel narrated from beyond the grave by Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old who is raped and murdered by a neighbour in a field near her suburban home . From a vantage point somewhere between heaven and earth, Susie follows the reactions and behaviour of her parents (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), her sister (Rose McIver) and her killer, Mr Harvey (Stanley Tucci), as she struggles to gain the closure that will allow her to depart this earth completely.

Not that we see anyone raped or even murdered in this $100 million, 12A version of the story: Jackson softens the edges of both the initial tragedy and its fallout among Susie’s family. But that’s not the main fault of the film. The real let-down is its heavy reliance on overblown special-effects sequences to represent the celestial limbo where Susie resides immediately after death. Coming across like Salvador Dali was commissioned to represent Middle Earth for the New Zealand tourist board, these scenes dominate the film to such an extent that you begin to doubt that Jackson has much concern for the real family disaster at the film’s heart. Wahlberg, Weisz and McIver are all sidelined in favour of the magic of the animator’s hard drive. It doesn’t help that a gin-swigging Susan Sarandon is called on to play Susie’s louche grandmother for inappropriate comic effect just when you feel the film could do with a touch more tragic weight.

However, these are mere niggles compared to the film’s fatal flaw: perspective. Who’s telling us this story? The answer, of course, should be Susie Salmon, and at points, we hear some of the book’s first-person narration as voiceover, including the well-known opening – ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973 – which graces the film’s opening and close . But there’s no consistency to Susie’s presence as the prism through which we see her story. Certainly the chocolate-box look of this American suburban world, which barely ever feels real, suggests that it’s a 14-year-old girl’s view of life. Yet there are whole sections of the movie when we forget Susie’s all-seeing eye and don’t know whether we’re in a family drama, a crime thriller or a horror. There are distracting hints of all three, without any of them taking hold and defining the tone of the film.

There are good points. Saoirse Ronan is a compelling presence as Susie Salmon, especially as she must have been acting alone and against a green screen for much of the shoot, and both her and the film are strong at capturing her burgeoning attraction to her schoolmate Ray (Reece Ritchie), a hint of adult sexuality cut short by tragedy. Stanley Tucci is creepy as Mr Harvey (even if he resembles a million movie paedophiles), and Jackson is at his best as a director when creating a sense of dread around Harvey whenever he’s anywhere near Susie or, later, her sister. Yet there’s no escaping the digital glare of Susie’s half-dead existence – a glare that threatens to blind us to anything remotely human in this drama.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-11-25 14:10:01

Time Out Online 25 November, 2009