The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is a bit of a hard sell, but then Peter Jackson's previous two projects were the supposedly unfilmable Lord Of The Rings movies and a remake of King Kong, already royally buggered in the 70's. But where he succeeded with those two he ultimately fails here. From the off the story of a fourteen year old girl telling you the story of her rape and murder at the hands of a neighbour, and the ruinous effect it has on her family, sounds like a difficult story to pull off, and so it proves. Jackson has many talents, but sadly subtlety isn't one of them.

Things start off well, we meet Susie Salmon, the victim played rather brilliantly by Saoirse Ronan, and she's just like any other fourteen year old girl, bubbly, fun and nervous about boys. But all of this is tainted with the knowledge, thanks to her narration, that she won't live to see her fifteenth birthday. Credit goes to Jackson here as when her demise comes at the end of act one it is still a genuinely tense moment, somehow made all the more difficult because the end result is known. But beyond this things start to come apart. The actors cannot be faulted, even Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz who do better than usual work as Susie's parents struggling in their own ways to come to terms with the loss of a child. Of course Stanley Tucci won an Oscar nomination for his unnerving turn as the murderer and it was deserved, as would one have been for Ronan. Susan Sarandon doesn't fare so well as the comic relief Grandmother though that seems to be as much a script issue as her performance.

In fact it's the script that proves the biggest bugbear. In the corporeal world we have a pretty straight forward grief drama with a Columbo style mystery, we know who did it now let's watch the characters solve it. It's pretty straightforward and nothing too special. But the twist in the tale is the supernatural element. Susie exists in a between state in a world of her creation lingering because she feels she has something to do. As it turns out this whole exercise, rendered in passable CGI and probably too trippy for some tastes, is all a bit pointless. The set-up leads the viewer to believe that Susie will somehow be involved in catching her killer from beyond the grave, but save for a few contrived plot points, she's pretty much passive. See it's really a film about letting go, Susie has to just as those she has left behind have to. The fact that her killer's still cutting about and may strike again? Forget about it, will ya?

It's probably this theme that has caused much bile to be projected at The Lovely Bones. Some criticism is indeed fair whereas some is certainly overkill. It's a deeply flawed movie for sure and one that Peter Jackson has misjudged pretty badly, it really doesn't seem like something he could ever have pulled off, yet Heavenly Creatures suggests otherwise. The inbetween world, although ultimately folly, is quite beautiful with some gorgeous imagery but ultimately you always feel too detached from a film that really should be moving you. Somewhere in the midst of these lovely bones there is a good film, but it needed a different type of director to find it.