Review: The Lovely Bones (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                        THE LOVELY BONES
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Peter Jackson visually overpowers what should
     have been a small personal story.  A murdered fourteen-
     year-old girl is in a limbo between heaven and earth
     from which she tries to bring her grieving family peace
     and at the same time get the murderer found out.  The
     overpowering glories of the afterlife are really a
     distraction from the real story that is taking place in
     our world.  More effort was needed in telling the
     earthbound story that seems superficial even in a
     135-minute movie.  Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon (played by Saoirse Ronan of
ATONEMENT) is murdered by neighbor George Harvey (the great Stanley
Tucci).  Susie does not go directly to heaven but to a sort of
limbo-world called the In-between.  She is not entirely in heaven,
and she is not entirely in the real world.  Instead she can see her
family and try to protect them.  She also tries to reveal who her
murderer is so that her family can find some closure.  Susie's
parents, played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, are absolutely
crushed by the tragedy.  Wahlberg seems to work overtime in being
the bereaved parent and Weisz seems not to have nearly enough to
do.  Susan Sarandon is along as the bad-girl grandmother who tried
to be as bad an influence as possible on Susie.

Traditionally a story like THE LOVELY BONES would have been treated
as a small personal film with just a few visual images to show the
metaphysical taking form in our world.  Just subtly hinting at the
world beyond worked for films like Jerry Zucker's GHOST and THE
UNINVITED.  That might have worked for this film, but Peter Jackson
was the wrong director to do that.  Jackson is known for his
flamboyant visual style.  He created huge spectacular vistas for
THE LORD OF THE RINGS and for KING KONG.  There was a place in this
film that it must have been irresistible for Jackson to put in
visuals.  After Susie is murdered in this film she goes to "The In-
between."  And apparently for Jackson the enticement was just too
great to spend a lot of money and make The In-between about as
glorious a place as his imagination could muster up.  It is full of
New Zealand splendor and special effects skies and landscape that
changes shape.  The problem is that is not where the important part
of the story takes place.  Most of the story takes pace in our
world.  The splendor of the In-between is not the point of the
story.  It is really a distraction.  Jackson spends too much time
trying to convince us it is a wonderful place for much too bizarre
a definition of wonderful.  It is out of place, like wearing a
diamond tiara with shorts and a t-shirt.

THE LOVELY BONES is reminiscent of WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, which did
not have nearly so good a story, but which gives us much more
creative images of heaven and hell.  The In-between seems to have
lots of wide-open space, but for some reason Jackson keeps
returning us to images of confined space.  We see a penguin in a
snow globe, we see ships in bottles, and the most claustrophobic
space of all is a small bunker built by the Tucci character as a
place where he can kill.  That bunker may be a detail from the
book, but it makes very little logic.  It is awfully well built and
nicely furnished.  It is hard to believe he could get all the
materials to built and furnish this underground room with nobody
noticing.  He would have had to do all this work in the middle of a
very flat and open field where he could be seen from a fair
distance away.  The idea that he could do all this construction and
not leave in it any clue for the police stretches the imagination
almost as much as the concept of the In-between does.

It is hard to know what Jackson was intending to do with this film.
Instead of telling the earth-story he seems to have wanted to give
us some indelible images of heaven--or a place very much like
heaven.  He misjudged the images and made them seem banal.  I rate
THE LOVELY BONES a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.  Jackson
can create the images of Middle Earth in beautiful detail, but he
seems to be unable to show a piece of paper carried by the wind
that does not look like it is being pulled by a string.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0380510/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1189344-lovely_bones/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2010 Mark R. Leeper