Based on Alice Sebold’s novel of the same name, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones sets out to tell the story of a girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) who is murdered at age 14 and must come to terms with her own death as she watches the aftermath from on high.
With the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson proved he was more than capable of telling a complicated story coherently. But Lovely Bones instead follows in the footsteps of the rather more self-indulgent King Kong, with everything coming off the rails except the quality of acting, so that we end up with an overlong mess reminiscent of David Fincher’s aimless, poorly paced Zodiac.
The Lovely Bones 
Directed by Peter Jackson. |
After her murder, Susie finds herself in a pleasant sort of purgatory, “the in-between,” where she can watch her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) coping poorly back in the world of the living. They move her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) in to help rear her two younger siblings, who are distracting themselves in their own ways (her sister has taken a suspicious interest in the killer, and her brother has recurring visions of Susie).
One of Jackson’s primary failures is the poorly articulated nature of the in-between and the issues around staying there; is Susie walking around in a ghostly version of reality like the husband in Silent Hill or watching the family she left behind on heavenly TV screens like Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life? Does it matter how long she stays? Is there a time limit?
Don’t expect to find out.
Even the fantastical elements of the afterlife, which was depicted with far more enthusiasm in 1998’s What Dreams May Come and here serves as a pale echo of the dreamscapes in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, seem drawn from a rolodex of clichés, ranging from giant versions of real-life miniatures (Mr. Salmon is obsessed with model ships in bottles) to the ethnic spiritual advisor who speaks in endearingly broken English.
Meanwhile, director Jackson simply cannot figure out whether he is following Susie through the stages of grief, exploring how families cope with tragedy, or giving us a cold-case thriller narrated posthumously by its heroine (apparently the whole trifecta is beyond his ability). Poor storytelling and lazy editing make a bipolar maniac out of Susie, who frolicks blissfully in one interlude only to swear bitter vengeance in the next.
The screenplay (which Jackson co-wrote with his usual collaborators) robs the book of much of its emotional weight by eliding entire, rather crucial story arcs while finding the time to dwell languorously and maddeningly on simple things such as a man rolling a box toward a pit or the enumeration of the killer’s past victims, to the extent that these brief scenes – mere phrases in a novel’s worth of storytelling – become agonizingly lengthy montages (think Rocky IV).
By failing to strike a balance between actual, everyday conversation and the loftier musings of Sebold’s prose, the script gives us a voiceover introducing (and justifying) the title – “these are the lovely bones that had grown around my absence” – which comes across as not only stilted but completely inane. Even the closing line of the book is robbed of its resonance, ending the film on a tepid note.
The one positive thing to be said for Lovely Bones is that the acting is dependably good all round. Wahlberg and Weisz don’t quite knock it out of the park as bereaved parents, but it’s impossible not to feel for them. Ronan is beyond reproach as the protagonist, and Stanley Tucci does a solid if conventional job as the serial killer neighbour, giving us an antagonist we can relish hating without making the role into a cartoon character.
Unfortunately, even Tucci’s villain is finally subject to a narrative cop-out in which cosmic justice is meted out unknown to the rest of the characters, neither offering viewers real closure nor making a point of withholding it the way Joel & Ethan Coen did with the murderous Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.
All told, Lovely Bones is overly saccharine and unpleasantly heavy-handed, laden with slow-motion repetition and cutesy “echoes” of one world resounding in the other. In an adaptation like this one, storytelling is the key to the whole puzzle, and Jackson isn’t much of a lock-pick. One thing Lovely Bones will do is give you newfound appreciation for the measured and effective storytelling in the Lord of the Rings all over again.