I’ve been a fan of just about everything director Peter Jackson has done, from his early splatter movies Bad Taste and Dead Alive up through the Lord of the Rings trilogy and his King Kong remake. And given the pedigree behind and in front of the camera, The Lovely Bones is certainly an interesting film, well-made in most respects.
That said, The Lovely Bones is also an incredibly misguided film that feels icky and unpleasant and all sorts of wrong. I remember a vague feeling of nausea after I first watched Dead Alive, an over-the-top gorefest that stands as one of the most violent movies ever made. The Lovely Bones is a PG-13 film about a young girl who is raped and murdered by a pedophile and yet, somehow, discovers that everything is still OK in the world. It left me feeling much worse.
Part of that is due to the director’s style, wholly inappropriate for the material. The obvious comparison would be to Heavenly Creatures, Jackson’s 1994 previous film involving young girls and murder, but there’s little resemblance; the fantasy world in that film was an internal extension of the young girls’ fantasies, here it’s an external force applied to a recently deceased girl. Instead of Lord of the Rings‘ CGI armies contrasted against a New Zealand backdrop, we have human grief and drama played out over a CGI mishmash of fantastic landscapes and bright colors. It’s Alice in Purgatory.
Bones was adapted by Jackson and longtime collaborators Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens from the novel by Alice Sebold, which I have not read but can imagine having some subtlety and an intimate power that has been lost on this overbearing feature.
If there’s one good thing about the film, it’s Saoirse Ronan as the dead girl, Susie Salmon. She’s not dead for the first twenty minutes or so, and the film feels promising: she’s a normal young girl with loving parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) and a schoolgirl crush, yearning for her first kiss.
But then she’s raped (?) and murdered (in “tasteful” offscreen fashion) by George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), the neighborhood pedophile who lives down the street. You know George is bad news from his ridiculous appearance: bad combover, square glasses, the classic mustache – he’s who parents think of when they tell their children not to take candy from strangers. Tucci, a great actor, somehow managed an Oscar nomination for his non-performance as a walking stereotype.
Susie narrates the rest of the story from beyond the grave, a magical wonderland of afterlife where she meets her killer’s previous victims. I use the term story loosely: there’s next to nothing going on throughout the rest of the film.
No investigation into the murder (oh, we hear of an investigation by some detectives and Susie’s father, who becomes obsessed, but there’s no active investigation that we actually follow), no closure to the main storyline, no follow-up to the side plots.
Just a lot of human grief, mostly surrounding Susie’s parents, which Jackson tries to punch up to the best of his ability. And there’s your problem, he shouldn’t be trying at all; let the damn story speak for itself. Susan Sarandon shows up as the spunky, cigarette-smoking grandma in an incredibly poorly-handled role that serves as a metaphor for the film itself.
There’s one good, if entirely improbable, scene – Susie’s sister (Rose McIver) breaks into the pedophile’s house, and must get back out before he catches her – but apart from that the final 90 minutes of The Lovely Bones are an outright bore, likely to turn your opinion on the film around even if you aren’t offended on the same level I was.
While there’s plenty good here – Ronen’s performance, the 70s atmosphere (which feels accurate if never right for the material – Sofia Coppola better captured the feel Jackson should have been going for in The Virgin Suicides), Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography, Brian Eno’s music – it’s never enough to make up for the awful taste the film left in my mouth. Roger Ebert put it best in his review:
“The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?”
