Secondhand Reviews: "The Lovely Bones"

Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" is one of those novels that presents formidable obstacles to movie makers daring enough to try to adapt it to film... much of its effect achieved as much through the poetry of the words rather than the actions depicted, a story of great dramatic events told with subtle, understated style... and a whole lot left to the imagination, including a great deal of the detail of what the afterlife is like. Would a director adapting it as a film be able to resist the temptation to turn it into a spectacle? We now have the answer: in the case of "Lord Of The Rings"'s Peter Jackson the answer, unfortunately, is no.

"The Lovely Bones" is the story of Suzie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been murdered by a sinister neighbor. Suzie herself tells her story in flashback from an afterlife way station, where she waits until she is "ready" to get into heaven. She not only tells what happened to her, but continues to follow the life of her friends and family on Earth, as they search for her, then gradually accept her death and shift the search to find her killer; and we see how they all are dealing with the trauma of their loss, including the young man Suzie hoped could become her first real boyfriend. Not to mention, of course, the evil Mister Harvey, the killer.

The original novel is a marvel of understated poetic style. We get to feel the pain of Suzie, her friends and family all the more intensely because the novel doesn't overplay it. But it seems like Peter Jackson doesn't trust the audience to understand the subtleties of the story, rather strange considering what a bestseller the book was. Instead he's given us Mark Wahlberg, an actor who has never seemed to me to understand the meaning of the word "subtle", playing Suzie's father and all but snarling in his frustration and anger... or, rather, pretends to show his anger and rage by snarling but not fooling anyone. Rachel Weisz and Stanley Tucci, normally highly reliable performers, just don't seem to have it in this film... Weisz sleepwalks through her role, and Tucci, in spite of his Oscar nomination for the part, plays Mr. Harvey as such a creepy sleazeball that he probably would have been picked up for questioning for every murder in the area each time one has occurred during the past several years. He certainly would have become the prime suspect as soon as Suzie was killed.

Then there's Susan Sarandon. She's already a screen legend, so "The Lovely Bones" certainly won't damage her reputation, but I have rarely seen a performance where there was such a total lack of effort to create a real person as there is here. Sarandon, playing Weisz's mother (who comes to live with the family after Suzie's murder) plays the eccentric, hard drinking grandmother with a complete lack of conviction and a sense that she's in a completely different kind of movie... something Jackson himself makes clear in an EXTREMELY unfortunate musical montage showing us how wild, hard-drinking granny is the wrong person to be taking care of the other two children. Even in a wacky slapstick comedy the scene would have been over the top, but tossed into the middle of a family tragedy it's in incredibly poor taste to say the very least.

Then there's the most unfortunate part of the film. The scenes in the afterlife have very little specific detail in the novel, wisely. I mean, the more precisely a film details what the afterlife is like the less effective it is... at least that's been the case in every film on the subject I've ever seen (I still cringe at the very thought of Robin Williams in "What Dreams May Come"), and Sebold's "way station" scenes tell us what HAPPENS there but virtually nothing about anything else. Peter Jackson, though, can't seem to resist the urge to remind us that he's the same guy who gave us the visual spectable of "Lord Of The Rings", and fills the scenes with Suzie and the companions she meets there surfing on icebergs that turn into waves and enough other CGI special effects to make his "Rings" moves look visually small-time. I couldn't help thinking "Enough, already! This movie doesn't need this!"

So, what's good about the film? Largely the performance of Saoirse Ronan in the role of Suzie. She was good in "Atonement", but she's an absolute wonder in "The Lovely Bones". Indeed, it would have made much more sense to me that if there was to be one acting Oscar nomination for this film, it should have been her rather than Tucci. She's a true, genuine innocent girl who loves her family and life in the early scenes, and honestly scared and mystified after her murder like a real teen would be, never coming across as someone ACTING the events she's portraying. The rest of the cast could have (and should have) taken lessons from her. She's the main reason that the conclusion of the film had the impact that it did. As Suzie delivers her farewell to the audience at the end of the film, in words taken directly from the ending of Sebold's novel, I will admit to having a few tears in my eye, because of the honesty of Siorise Ronan's acting. If she chooses the right roles in the future, she has an amazing career ahead of her.

Ultimately, I can't really come out and say that the film is a thumbs up. It follows the plot details of the source material to an admirable degree, even to the extent of including much of the book's dialogue. And of course there's that dynamite performance by Ronan. But I'm afraid that Peter Jackson's refusal to... or inability to... play the film with the same subtlety as the book... a subtlety that it needs if it's to succeed... sabotages the movie. It's one of the great cliches of movie adaptations, but I'm afraid that "The Lovely Bones" in yet another case of "Skip the movie, read the book."