The Lovely Bones
The Lovely Bones - the first review
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Monday, 15, Feb 2010 10:08
Directed by Peter Jackson, out January 29th in cinemas, starring Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, running time .
What's it all about?
Adapted from Alice Sebold's bestseller, The Lovely Bones tells of 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Ronan), raped and murdered by neighbour George Harvey (Tucci) in a wintry 1973 Pennsylvania. Having moved on to her own personal heaven, Susie watches her family and friends attempt to move on with their lives.
As an example...
"Why didn't I see something or hear something? Because, surely, that little girl must have screamed." - George Harvey
"You have a tomb in the middle of your house - do you really think if you seal it up that the pain's gonna go away?" - Grandma Lynn
What the others say
"This was never going to be an easy story to film. Using the same characters and many events, Jackson and his team tell a fundamentally different story. It's one that is not without its tension, humour and compelling details. But it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original." - Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
"When it sticks to the everyday neighbourhood inhabited by its characters, The Lovely Bones, which was shot on Pennsylvania locations and in New Zealand studios, finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades." - Todd McCarthy, Variety
So is it any good?
With both fantastical (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) and feminine (Heavenly Creatures) films in his back catalogue, Peter Jackson's probably the ideal person to realise a bestselling novel concerned with a murdered teenager who watches her bereaved family from the other side. Jackson's a master at the emotionally wrought - witness the silent screams of the hobbits after Gandalf's fall in The Fellowship of the Ring - and he's one of only a few directors who could be trusted to visualise the afterlife and bring Gilliam and Dali to mind, rather than provoking sneering comparisons to 1998 weepie What Dreams May Come. But despite a magnificent Saoirse Ronan again proving that Dakota Fanning needs to up her game if she wants every 'teen with wisdom beyond her years' roles, The Lovely Bones isn't the moving and metaphysical Bildungsroman hoped for by the book's many devotees.
There's much to admire about the film, nonetheless, with its drab, suburban 70s setting tinged with an almost frightening sadness. An unrecognisable Stanley Tucci is chilling as the seemingly innocuous neighbour-turned-murderer and it's little surprise to learn that he felt the need to bond with Ronan between takes so as to shake off the evil of the character. An underused Rachel Weisz puts in a poignant performance - despite some curious changes to her grieving mother character in the path from page to screen - while a big-haired, scotch-soaked Sarandon provides some welcome comic relief as the ship-steadying grandmother.
Jackson's artistry, too, is for the most part in full, thrilling flow, with the tender father-daughter relationship between an average Wahlberg and Ronan intercut with the vicious schemes of the murderer. Much of the netherworld inhabited by Susie after her killing is also entirely spellbinding, with the teen's skipping through an ever-changing dreamscape imagery evocative of a step into a screensaver landscape. Gigantic ships-in-bottles crash upon a windswept shore, an eerie light seeps from an underwater house, a cornfield sways like the sea before a clock face moon, and an autumnal forest bleeds into a wintry plain that just as swiftly becomes a deserted beach, then a moonlit cove.
The energy and imaginative depth of Susie's heaven - which Jackson has smartly insisted should not be seen as the definitive depiction of the afterlife - embody the strongest aspects of The Lovely Bones. There's care and detail in every aspect of the film, whether its swift characterisation, design, sound, depictions of grief and love, or the titanic effort and invention dedicated to realising the "blue horizon" inhabited by Susie after her murder. At its best, The Lovely Bones is a moving crime drama with echoes of the trauma of Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River and an otherworldly twist that veers closer to Dali and Gilliam territory than to What Dreams May Come.
But Susie's deathly dreamland also contains the film's greatest weakness; its faithful but unavoidable sentiment. As she begins to come to terms with her death and prepares to take a final step into the next realm, accompanied by other murdered girls, it's tough to shake the feeling that you're watching a Benetton ad set in a sunnier version of the Elysian fields seen in Gladiator. Too often are we presented with twee, overwhelmingly sugary imagery that obscures the distressing but vital truth of the tale - the violent killing of a teenage girl.
Though the murder scene and its aftermath are undoubtedly shocking, and masterfully interspersed with the Salmon family's transformation from oblivious ignorance to terror, the courting of a PG13 rating means the ferocity of the novel is lost. In choosing to leave the horror of Susie's murder to the viewer's imagination and the more-than-capable hands of the superb Ronan, the emotional impact of the film never quite equals that of Sebold's immensely affecting book.
The Lovely Bones is a life-affirming, strongly performed film made with the precision and imagination you'd expect from the team that brought Middle Earth to life. But in hiding the unflinching and shocking brutality of Susie's death, the film is nagged by the same sense of unfinished business as its protagonist's ethereal bid for justice.
7/10
Lewis Bazley