The Lovely Bones Review [3]

Posted by Trevor Snyder on 01.26.2010

He's successfully taken on zombies, aliens, and even orcs...but in a dead little girl, director Peter Jackson may have met his match.

THE LOVELY BONES (2009)



Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson
Based on the book by: Alice Sebold
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, and Michael Imperioli
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving disturbing violent content and images, and some language.

Normally I wouldn't bother reviewing a movie that has been out for awhile, and that already has two previous reviews on this site. But since those reviews have a completely different opinion than I do, I thought it might be interesting to have a different perspective on here.


There is something odd about The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel of the same name. Like the book, the film tells the tale of young Susie Salmon (like the fish), a teenage murder victim who watches over her mourning family and friends from the “in-between,” a sort of waiting room for those not yet ready to fully cross over into the main part of heaven. In the movie, we watch as Susie’s family falls apart at its seams following her death, unable to cope with the reality of their tragedy. Then we cut to Susie, up in the in-between, which can take the form of pretty much whatever you want it to be. We see Susie and her new (dead) best friend having the time of their non-lives up there – dancing, sledding, etc. We see this and we think, “man, if only her family knew. There is absolutely nothing to be sad about. As far as I can tell, it looks like being murdered is awesome!”

I don’t think that’s what Jackson was going for.

It sure as heck wasn’t what Sebold was going for. This review is not an indictment of Sebold’s novel, which tells the same story (more or less), but does so with so much more depth and gravitas. The story and the characters that inhabit it are essentially the same in Sebold’s book, but we care so much more about them than we do in the movie. Why? What went wrong here? I have thought about this for some time since seeing the film, in order to figure it out. After all, Jackson is no slouch of a filmmaker. We all know better than that. In fact, with Lord of the Rings, Jackson and his usual co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens proved that they were up to the task of expertly filming allegedly un-filmable material. So why does it seem like this book – which on the surface is nowhere near as complex as Lord of the Rings – somehow defeated them?

It’s easy to say that perhaps it’s because The Lovely Bones is a much more emotional tale than Lord of the Rings, with more of its power coming from actual human drama than from fantasy-driven fare that can be accomplished with FX (although it certainly has that, as well). But that might be too easy, and besides, Jackson pulled off character-driven work quite well in Heavenly Creatures (the film that is stylistically closest to Lovely Bones in Jackson’s filmography). So, no, I don’t think that’s quite it.

I think the problem might just be a matter of presentation and of viewpoint. And although I believe that many supposedly “un-filmable” books should be attempted anyway, there is no doubt that certain books just don’t lend themselves to a filmed version…and this sure seems to be one of them. The problem here is that the entire book is told in a first-person account of the already dead Susie. By having Susie narrate the whole thing, we really get to feel like we know her, and we understand just what it is the world lost by being robbed of this wise-beyond-her-years girl. The movie can’t really hope to capture that – sure, the Susie narration is retained, but only in bits and pieces. She is an occasional narrator, while the majority of the time the movie is simply presented in the usual cinematic "omniscient narrator" manner. As such, we are not allowed to bond with Susie in quite the same way as we were in the book.

Jackson and company must have realized that, and so they overcompensate by adding in what is basically a new opening act. Whereas the book immediately started off with Susie’s rape and murder, allowing knowledge of her life to be filled in later, Jackson’s film instead starts off showing us what Susie’s life is all about. We see her with her family, and wow, everything is great. Too great. Jackson wants us to feel how happy everyone is so the tragedy will hit harder later, but he piles it on a little thick. During this part of the film, the characters don’t so much feel like real people as they do refugees from a Hallmark card. In my experience, families this perfect only exist in movies where something bad is about to happen.

The other problem with not seeing the whole thing through Susie’s eyes is that it unfortunately only highlights the aforementioned schizophrenic tone of the story. This was more tolerable in the book, where we experienced every moment with Susie. But in the movie, there is a weird disconnect between Susie’s adventures in the in-between and the events going on back on earth. The movie wants us to feel the family’s pain at what has happened, but it is tough to do so when Susie really seems to be doing just fine in her personal slice of heaven. It truly is an odd juxtaposition, and it can be hard to figure out what kind of point the film is trying to make about the tragedy of Susie’s murder when we are suddenly treated to a wacky comedic montage of the drunken grandmother (Susan Sarandon) and her disastrous attempts to clean the house. Life goes on, I guess? Tonally, this movie is all over-the-place. I’ve seen that work in some rare occasions – this isn’t one of them.

Jackson, Walsh and Boyens have also made some changes to the book’s overall story, which is usually fine, in theory. Most adaptations are forced to make these kind of changes for sake of both clarity and time, and that’s where the art of an excellent adaptation shines through. But some of the changes here are baffling to me. I don’t mean the slight shifting of when certain events occur. I can live with that. But why the outright removal of certain subplots, such as the mother’s affair with the investigating detective? At least that storyline gave those characters a little more depth – they both feel slightly shortchanged here (a shame, given that they are played by Rachel Weisz and Michael Imperioli, two actors who you should never underutilize). Maybe Jackson felt this made the mother too unlikable – but his treatment of her character doesn’t really do her any favors either, and in fact makes her motivations even harder to understand.

There is also a strange sanitizing of Sebold’s work at play here. I don’t really get why, but the fact that Susie was raped before being murdered is completely exorcized from the film. Oh, sure, I suppose you could infer it, but by essentially glossing over it, Jackson seems to have undermined the horror of Susie’s fate. Not as important, but just as odd, is the change in Susie’s motivation to take over the body of a psychic classmate in order to spend a last moment with the boy she likes. Jackson has removed the idea of sex from this part, as well, instead changing it into a chaste tale of a girl who just wants the first kiss that was denied her. I guess Jackson was doing all he could to keep this film at a PG-13. But you know what? Maybe this story shouldn’t be PG-13.

Finally, to wrap up the “what doesn’t work” department, I have to mention the in-between itself, an FX-created wonderland that, not surprisingly, is far less impressive when shown to you onscreen than it was when you were creating it in your own imagination while reading the book. That was an obvious problem that the movie was going to have to deal with, and it might have been OK, but only if we had gotten something a little more impressive than what we have here. Don’t get me wrong – the fantasy landscape, with its constantly shifting seasons (based on Susie’s current emotions), looks decent enough in an obvious green-screen way. But with something like Avatar currently playing alongside The Lovely Bones, there is a somewhat disappointing lack of true awe over the world presented here.

It’s a shame that so many of the film’s elements don’t work, because the cast deserves a lot better than what they have ended up with. Everyone onscreen does a fine job, and none of the blame falls on their shoulders. Even Mark Walhberg puts in a better than expected (or at least better than I expected) performace as Susie’s father, especially considering he was a last-minute replacement for Ryan Gosling, who dropped out due to “creative differences” one month before filming began. Walhberg is a father himself, though, and I’m sure he has no trouble relating to the terror of potentially losing a child. The two standouts, though, are no doubt Saoirse Ronan as Susie and Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, her murderer. Ronan is an amazingly charismatic presence, her large blue eyes just made to be shown onscreen. In a movie that better captured Sebold’s story, this might have been a superstar making performance for her. As is, she is still very good, and it’s not hard to expect one heck of a career in her future (then again, she already has an Academy Award nomination under her belt, so maybe I’m understating it).

Meanwhile, all the hype you have probably heard about Tucci’s work is more than deserved. His performance is slimy and seething, but masked behind a façade of politeness. He is truly scary, and although the movie lazily abandons the novel's revelations of Harvey’s traumatic childhood (which in turn actually made Susie develop some pity for him) in order to paint him as a more generic baddie, Tucci’s work still makes him feel like the most fully realized character of the bunch. This is definitely an award-worthy performance…it’s just too bad for Tucci that it came in the same year as Christoph Waltz’ work in Inglourious Basterds.

In the end, The Lovely Bones is not a terrible film. Jackson is too talented of a filmmaker to allow it to sink that far. Even his bad movies have powerful moments, and that’s certainly the case here (the sequence where Susie realizes she is dead, while watching her murderer take a bath to wash off her blood, is particularly haunting). But, unfortunately, these moments never add up to a particularly involving whole. There is something wrong when a movie about a family dealing with a tragic death has no real emotional connections to speak of. This is a frustratingly misguided film, one that misses the human warmth and spirit of its source material, and mistakenly tries to make up for it by just throwing out so many different kinds of scenes and ideas that hopefully the audience won’t notice that none of it gels together. There is a great message and meaning to Sebold’s novel…I really wish Jackson could have found it, too.

The 411: Peter Jackson seemed like a pretty good choice to helm a movie version of Alice Sebold's popular book about a murdered teenage girl watching over her family from heaven. Unfortunately, though, the emotional weight of Sebold's story eludes Jackson, and even the excellent work of the cast can't make up for the resultant tonal mess. There are bits and pieces of what could have been a very good movie mixed throughout, but overall this is one heck of a disappointment.

Final Score:  6.0   [ Average ]