“The Lovely Bones” (2009)

On paper it must have seemed a great idea to have Peter Jackson adapt “The Lonely Bones”.  What better material for a filmmaker looking to reestablish his credentials as a director of serious drama after high profile success making fantasies?  Like “Heavenly Creatures”, Jackson’s best work, Alice Sebold’s novel features a young female protagonist, murder, and flights of fancy in which characters escape into their own imaginative worlds.  With his “Lord of the Rings” co-scenarists Phillipa Boyens and Lady Fran Walsh on board what could possibly go wrong?

One might more usefully ask, what goes right?  Sadly, very little.  At least there is no faulting the performance of Saoirse Ronan in the lead role of Susie Salmon, the 14 year old who is killed by a neighbour in 1970s suburbia.  Building on her sensational break through performance in “Atonement” the Irish raised Ronan is a luminous presence. Whether mooning around dreaming of her first kiss, quietly bonding with her doting dad, or slowly registering the true character of her murderer Ronan credibly displays the full range of adolescent feelings from sulky petulance to justifiable outrage.  A shame then that Jackson surrounds her with actors eight years her senior - in someways undermining the casting coup - and that he gives us too much of a good thing by employing the type of wall to wall voice over narration that might read well on the page but in a film comes across as repetitive and needlessly literal.

If Ronan is a saving grace the last minute decision to cast Mark Wahlberg as Susie’s grief struck father nearly singlehandedly sinks “The Lovely Bones”.  Saddled with a simply awful period hair cut and about one and a half facial expressions the former underwear model is incapable of offering any kind of insight into human emotions let alone currying audience sympathy for his character’s plight.  In fact, I was rooting for his wife - the ever delectable Rachel Weiz - to have an affair with the investigating police officer.  It says a lot about how much off their game Jackson and co. are that they shot scenes detailing this affair and then disregarded them, perhaps for fear that it would add a touch of erotic spice and excitement to all the New Age blandness.

Susie’s afterlife experience, as she elects to stay in some kind of limbo realm whilst watching over her family, is annoyingly ill defined and ultimately undone by a lack of internal logic and a multiplicity of symbols and motifs that signify next to nothing.  Someone who has read the book explained to me that it is meant to be a fourteen year old’s concept of heaven.  It feels more like a rich, middle-aged director’s guess at what that might be, a CGI environment closer to the hell of Vincent Ward’s wretched “What Dreams May Come” than the sublime dream sequences in “Heavenly Creatures”.

As reprehensible as the failure to pull off the fantasy elements without the required sense of wonder is the decision to pull punches when it comes to the serial killer aspects of the story.   For someone who is always quoting Hitchcock in interviews Jackson seems strangely ignorant of the lessons of “Psycho”, squandering an interesting performance by Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, the neighbourhood murderer.  The refusal to really reflect on Harvey’s psychology and to tastefully avoid the sexual element of his crimes effectively neuters “The Lovely Bones”.  At no point is the kind of dark atmosphere of films like David Fincher’s “Zodiac” or Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” even approached.

For me two sequences summed up what an utter mess “The Lovely Bones” is.  The first involves the re-entry of Susan Sarandon’s grandmother character into the story.  It is an extended montage in which she is seen smoking and drinking whilst attempting various domestic tasks.  That it is not even remotely funny is secondary to the fact that this kind of ‘rom com’ humour has no logical place whatsoever in the movie.  Did Jackson’s attention waver to such an extent that he thought he was Nora Ephron directing Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston?

Worse still is a later scene, the first of “The Lovely Bones”‘ several false endings.  An isolated instance of actual tension, it sees Susie’s younger sister break into Harvey’s house, discovering a crucial piece of evidence but then being caught in the act.  All this good work is then undone however when Jackson chooses to segue into another scene entirely, dissipating all said tension.  A moment of domestic reconciliation between the parents, one that has in no way been signalled in the narrative, it has no dramatic weight, falling completely flat.

I was left bewildered as to what the point of “The Lovely Bones” was.  Despite all the blather and smoke and mirror effects that go into representing an idealised afterlife it’s metaphysical themes are embarrassingly superficial and confused.  As a study in grief and stoical endurance it lacks any emotional resonance.  Even its examination of the teenage mindset is bedevilled by romantic nonsense about ‘first kisses’ and prom nights.  In future Sir Peter had best stick to those masculine projects he’s personally invested in and leave the melodrama to others.