Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
1/18/10
It's
like a law of physics: a blockbuster novel MUST spawn a film adaptation,
preferably one jam-packed with big-name talent and positioned as an Oscar
contender. I've never read Alice Sebold's million-selling The
Lovely Bones, which doesn't sound like my cup of tea, and nothing about
Peter Jackson's film version leads me to believe that was the wrong choice.
However, it does persuade me that it's a novel not really meant to be filmed.
Combining a queasy thriller about a child murderer with an Oprah's-eye
view of the Afterlife, The Lovely Bones seems designed to drift
unsatisfyingly all over the map, but this particular take on it also sputters
out just when it should be getting good. Jackson does his best, getting
great performances from his first-rate cast, creating a memorable vision
of a personalized afterlife and delaying the inevitable deflation of the
plot as long as he can. As such, The Lovely Bones isn't a
bad movie. But it also doesn't “work” by any definition, winding
up as a lovely pile of puzzle pieces that don't connect.
It's
1973, a happy time for the Salmon family: Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and
Abigail (Rachel Weisz) and their kids Susie (Saoirse Ronan), Lindsey (Rose
McIver) and Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale). Susie has a crush
on an older boy named Ray (Reece Ritchie), who almost kisses her before
asking her to meet him at the mall that weekend. She doesn't make
it: creepy neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) lures her into
an underground chamber of his own construction and kills her. Susie's
spirit ends up in The In-Between, an afterlife that is not Heaven, but
allows her and fellow deceased teen Holly (Nikki SooHoo) to live out magical
fantasies. But The In-Between is also closely tied to the world they
left behind, and Susie can't let go of the people she loved there or the
frightening specter of her murderer. As time goes by and Police Detective
Len Fenerman finds no answers, Jack becomes more and more obsessed with
solving the case on his own, driving Abigail away. Grandma Lynn (Susan
Sarandon) moves in to help take care of the kids, but nothing will be over
as long as George lives on their street. Both Jack and Lindsey have
turned their eyes toward him, and he's begun to feel his own hunger to
take the live of a second Salmon Girl.
The
Lovely Bones gets off to a tremendous start, and is strangely at its
best when it's not about anything other than taking a snapshot of the Salmon
family, brought to delightful, vibrant life by Jackson's excellent cast.
Little issues like Susie taking more photos than her parents can afford
to develop and Jack's love of building ships in bottles have the immediacy
of life to them, and the opening scenes do all they can be asked and more
to invest us in the movie's characters. Even once George makes his
move, the family drama works, but the tragic Salmons are never quite as
interesting as the ones who didn't have a hook. It's telling that
the most compelling character in the later stretches is Grandma Lynn, the
one most successful at putting Susie's death behind her. How we deal
with tragedy is a rich vein of subject matter that's been mined brilliantly
by many movies over the years, but The Lovely Bones doesn't really
have anything to add, and details like Abigail moving away to pick fruit
verge on Telenovella absurdity.
The
thriller and In-Between plots do have some pop on their own, and the ways
that George looms over Susie's Afterlife is effectively mounted.
Jackson creates an intriguing place built from the fantasies and tragedies
of people with a common thread, and a montage of Susie and Holly doing
all the things they dreamed of in a personalized Little Girl Heaven is
quite effective. The gazebo where she planned to meet Ray sits at
the center of her world now, and the way it and its surroundings change
depending upon her reaction to the events she sees happening in the Land
of the Living make for a visual feast. Meanwhile, George is a spectacularly
loathsome character, brought to unsettling life by Tucci. This is
no Hannibal Lecter, but a banal, useless man whose only joy comes from
the planning and execution of murder. And the stretches where he
tries to wait out the investigation while Jack and Lindsey slowly come
to notice the killer who's been hiding in plain sight across the street
are quite suspenseful.
Pity,
then, that the point of Sebold's story as adapted by Jackson and his usual
collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens is that none of what happens
after Susie dies really matters. Plot points sputter out and climaxes
are more or less random as we're frustrated again and again by things that
happen off-camera while Susie takes care of the one bit of outstanding
business she really cares about in a fairly ridiculous manner. I
suppose we're to applaud these people for “moving on”, but since it's a
fictional tragedy created for the purposes of telling a story, I'd prefer
that story to have an ending. The final 20 minutes or so fade frustratingly
into the distance, and even Susie's final decisions are left to the imagination.
The
reason I cared at all is that the performances are just so great.
Ronan, so wonderful in a totally different role in Atonement,
creates a totally believable and relateable teenage girl of the early 70's,
and carries that worldview on to the Other Side. Wahlberg, the iconic
movie tough guy, is also skilled at playing nerds, and Jack is at first
delightfully banal and then tragically obsessive. Until she runs
off to pick fruit, Weisz trades skillfully on her gift for playing charming
Everywomen (few actresses can flash such a friendly smile), and uses it
to break our hearts once Abigail's world collapses around her. Sarandon
comes to chew bubblegum and steal scenes and fights valiantly to keep the
movie alive when the plot and pace grow more and more deliberate.
The actors playing the kids, including Ritchie and Carolyn Dando as a girl
whose psychic powers serve only to set up that silly climax I mentioned
earlier, don't get nearly as much to work with and don't fare nearly as
well.
I suspect
those characters were more important to the book, although a quick skimming
of its Wikipedia plot synopsis suggests that Jackson and company did the
best they could to take a sprawling soap opera and stuff it into 135 coherent
minutes. Amazingly, some fans of the book have criticized them for
cutting that actual murder, but what we do see of George's luring of Susie
into his trap is almost unbearably queasy on its own. I can't recall
the last movie scene I so wanted to grab a remote control and fast-forward
through.
For
all that The Lovely Bones intrigues and diverts, the necessity of
telling this story remains somewhat elusive. I wish Jackson could
find his way back to the time before he was an Oscar-winner, when his movies
had more spring in their step (a curse he shares with his Frighteners
collaborator Robert Zemeckis, who was never the same after the Forrest
Gump phenomenon). Like King Kong, The Lovely Bones
is too slow, too self-important, and just good enough to make it over the
“worth seeing” bar. For some reason, it also ends with the longest,
largest-fonted, slowest end credits crawl I can remember on a movie over
90 minutes long. Of course, it still takes a lot longer to read that
book, which I'll leave to you. As Susie reminds us, life is pretty
short. |
