With The Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson finally becomes everything that he threatened to be with his last two films: graceless, tactless, and unable to imbue his constant special effects with the slightest sense of weight or gravity. It’s been a long time coming (really, who could go from anonymity to deity in the way that he has without believing your own hype), but the worst thing that can be said isn’t that it’s his first bad film; it’s that it’s his first film that doesn’t feel like a Peter Jackson film.
At the tender age of 14, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is killed by her neighbor Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci). This isn’t a spoiler, but rather the first twenty minutes of the film. Going on from there to a candy-colored vision of the afterlife, she is able to watch firsthand the effect that her death has on her neighborhood and her family. Everyone reacts differently; her mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) pulls away from the memory while her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and sister Lindsay (Rose McIver) are consumed by it, never satisfied with the police handling of the case. Gradually, they are each forced to do what they need to do to move on, and Susie, in turn, is forced to do the same.
Those of you who have read the novel (and there seem to have been an awful lot of you) will be familiar with the various challenges inherany in adapting weighty literature; namely the extended chronology of the storyline and the visualization of the afterlife (not to mention some less than sure-footed character work). Jackson, being the director that we all know him to be, chooses (either consciously or unconsciously) to focus most of his energy on the latter, while giving short shrift to nearly every other facet of the story. One of the things that made the book so successful was its exceptional sense of balance and the way that it managed to make several characters that never interact with one another feel as if they are part of a single, cohesive whole (the lovely bones that the title references). Here, Jackson displays no such sense of direction (as he did in the Lord of the Rings films, particularly The Two Towers), and instead allows the various facets to happen simultaneously, without ever meaningfully giving us any explanation as to why they are linked save that they are events that occur in the book. His handling of what he chose to include doesn’t do him any favors, either. Where Jackson could once be depended upon to film everything from a zombie massacre (in Dead-Alive) to an orgy of clay people (in Heavenly Creatures) with clarity and focus, here he can’t seem to keep his camera in a fixed position for more than a few seconds, treating even mundane sequences as if they are climaxes of supreme horror or divine revelation. Even his Heaven, if you can believe it, feels overdone, making the lavish What Dreams May Come look subdued in comparison.
This would not feel like such a disappointment if the film did not hint at, in the begining anyway, so much of what makes Jackson such a strong director. His casting is spot on, bearing few signs of the Hollywood machine’s desire to turn this into anyone’s vehicle, and everyone here does what they can with what they are given (Tucci here is especially good, avoiding nearly every cliché of villain acting to turn in a performance that is both menacing and mundane). His period detail is no less lovingly rendered than the mines of Moria or Skull Island (though its lack of specificity can’t help but suggest that Jackson was not present at the time). And, every so often, there is a special effect that bears the distinctive Jackson stamp (particularly an armada of enormous ships-in-bottles crashing against a beach), even if they feel out of place among the less spectacular details. But even those are not enough to give you the feeling that Jackson is really present here, struggling to do his best in unfamiliar territory, instead of just providing material for his own WETA workshop.
As my film going companion pointed out, I might have enjoyed this film more had I not had the book to compare it to, and that might be true. But honestly, the far more damning comparison is Jackson’s own Heavenly Creatures, another story about teenage girls who find themselves lost in a fantasy world. In early interviews, Ronan stated that "Whenever Susie feels happy, Heaven is sunny and there's birds and everything. Whenever it’s not so great, it's raining or she’s in the middle of an ocean.” While one can see that concept at work, it is really only that: a concept, which in practice translates to something that hits you on an intellectual level rather than an emotionally engaging one. Creatures, on the other hand, keeps its fantasy world firmly in tune with its lead characters (Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey), using his special effects to complement their heightened emotions rather than hang them up like an elaborate puppet show. The Lovely Bones never finds that medium, and as a result never finds the even keel that got the book through its rough patches (particularly a climactic scene lifted directly out of Ghost). We are left with something that could have been Jackson’s next great film, but instead signals a low-water mark in his career that suggests that he should take his work in a new direction.
"The Lovely Bones" opens December 11, 2009 and is rated PG13. Drama, Fantasy. Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Peter Jackson & Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens (Screenplay) Alice Sebold (Novel). Starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver.
