The Lovely Bones
Posted:
17 Mar 2010
It’s easy to think of ways in which the film version of Alice Sebold’s best-seller could have gone wrong, but Peter Jackson’s intriguing misfire of an adaptation devises new ones. At first, the movie conjures a ’70s mood as coolly enigmatic as anything in The Virgin Suicides; the story – in which 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by her owlish neighbour (Stanley Tucci), then observes what happens afterward as she climbs to heaven – feels surprisingly mystical and unlaboured (perhaps because Mark Wahlberg, as the grieving father, underplays too much).
The inert, effects-laden afterlife sequences suggest that Jackson badly needed a green-screen sabbatical, and it is refreshing to see him mostly working on a smaller scale – The Lovely Bones is closer to Heavenly Creatures than the computer-generated awe of Lord of the Rings and King Kong. You can even forgive some tonal schizophrenia, especially when Susan Sarandon (as Susie’s raucous grandmother) is being such a good sport.
No, The Lovely Bones is done in by more conventional problems of compression. It’s not Jackson’s elision of the novel’s rape, a decision that seems less an evasion than a stylistic choice. It’s that he’s jettisoned the last third of the book, rendering the material totally incoherent. In a story about grieving, an additional ten years makes a big difference. Ladling uplift over tragedy, a film that might have seemed exploitative now seems simply bizarre.
Ben Kenigsberg
From Time Out Chicago
Dir Peter Jackson, Category IIA, 136 mins, opens March 18
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