Henry Saw: The Lovely Bones

Yikes...maybe Peter Jackson should have stayed on Middle-Earth...


Wow...this movie really stunk.

Peter Jackson's ninth feature-length film, his second since completing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is an even bigger mess than King Kong, his first follow-up to his adaptation of Tolkien's saga. At least King Kong, which was marred by a bloated script and poor casting, had moments that stuck with me (I'm thinking especially of the interaction between Naomi Watts and Kong). The problem with Kong was that it was a passion project for Jackson and those tend to not work out so well for directors. Whether it is Spielberg's Hook, Scorcese's Gangs of New York, or in the extreme, Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote, the Film Gods seem to punish directors who try to make a film they've always dreamed of doing.

With that apparent bad karma out of the way, and a brief flirtation with the Halo franchise, Jackson moved on to adapting Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones. Sebold's novel, released in 2002, tells the story of a 14 year old girl named Suzie Salmon, her murder at the hands of a neighbor, and how her family deals with the loss. What separates The Lovely Bones from other grieving family dramas is that the entire story is told from Suzie's perspective. Even after she dies, Suzie finds herself in the In-Between (somewhere like Limbo) and watches her family and her killer in the months following her death.



Let's break this down piece by piece:

Story: The whole plot of the film is really rather dull. Since anyone who knows a thing about the book or movie knows that Suzie dies, there is no real shock or pain in her death, and everything before that scene just feels like inconsequential build-up to her murder. Once Suzie is in the In-Between, nothing that happens in that realm matters or is in anyway involving, so we really just want to get back to seeing her family. The problem is...they are not that interesting either. The family dynamic is painted in very broad strokes. Her father (played by Mark Wahlberg) is the most obviously upset one; he's obsessed with finding out who did it and has emotional breakdowns. Her mother (Rachel Weisz) is keeping it all inside and won't even go into Suzie's old room. Her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) is the sassy drunk trying to keep the family together and her sister...her sister is...well she has no character whatsoever.

What story there is in the film mostly comes from Suzie's killer (Stanley Tucci). We see him cleaning up the mess he made, dealing with routine police inquiries, and interacting with the Salmon family. The problem is that all we want to see is Tucci's character be caught and punished. He's not Norman Bates cleaning up after his mother...we never are on his side or in his world...we just want him handled. While we are suppose to see how frustrated Suzie is watching her killer go unpunished, it ended up just turning me against the film, and the film never gave me any thread to hold onto.

Acting: Part of the blame for that falls on the acting. Wahlberg is really bad here. He's not all together different from his whining and cloying performance in The Happening. I never once believed this was a man grieving for his daughter. Weisz is underused...but she's not that great when she's on screen. Surandon is also given nothing to do, she's charming when she's around, but her character is so one-note and superfluous that she quite easy to forget.



Stanley Tucci has been getting a lot of good press for his role as the killer George Harvey (what an uninspired name) but I found his performance to be merely okay. Yeah, he's creepy, but he's not that different from doing a parody of a child molester. Look at Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children for a compelling portrait of a disturbed man with similar issues (Haley's character is not a murderer but the point is still valid). Tucci does go to some dark places, and is very effective in his interaction with Suzie right before her death, but kind of sleep walks through the rest of the film. As the murdered girl Saoirse Ronan (from Atonement) is solid, she does a good American accent, and though she's asked to act against a lot of green screen she holds our attention.

Effects: To make the In-Between stand out Peter Jackson had it be a lush, changing environment that is a mix between Narnia, the movie What Dreams May Come, and every generic image of heaven (sans angels) that you can imagine. While it didn't help that I thought all the scenes in the In-Between were tedious bores, I also thought that the look itself was quite dull, and expected a lot better from Jackson.



Direction: I recently rewatched Heavenly Creatures, the film that first put Jackson on the map in America, and what stood out was how cool the direction in that film was. Lots of interesting camera angles, perspectives, stylistic choices...its really a tour de force. Then there are the Lord of the Rings movies which were perfectly put together, using almost every cinematic technique in the book, and seemed to announce Jackson as the premier filmmaker of the era. Unfortunately, The Lovely Bones is a real step down from those films. There's almost nothing different about this film, it's all so paint by numbers, and there's none of the innovation to be found in the much more modestly budgeted Heavenly Creatures. While he does a fair job building tension in a few scenes, that's really the only positive I can say, as the rest of the film is really quite boring and, at times, kind of baffling.



So this was a big old misfire from Jackson. We'll see if he can recover from this failure with the Tintin films that he is making with Spielberg (who has also stopped making quality movies) but I'm not too hopeful. There's nothing to recommend about The Lovely Bones so don't bother seeing it when it goes wide later this month.

Grade: D+

Best Scene: I suppose the scene between Suzie and George right before her death...though it's hurt by some bad editing...because it is effective at being really uncomfortable and creepy.