The Lovely Bones

I never read Alice Sebold's book on which the film is based, although I wish I had so I could know what the tone of the story is meant to be. I certainly couldn't figure out what the tone of Peter Jackson's film version of The Lovely Bones was supposed to be. While, overall I found the film to be long, overly sentimental in all the wrong places, and bipolar, it had some great acting by everyone involved--which just made the whole thing that much more frustrating to watch.



The Lovely Bones centers around the rape and murder of a fourteen year old girl named Susie Salmon (Saorise Ronan) by a serial killer neighbor. We spend the first half hour of the movie getting to know Susie and her sweet, loving, perfect 1970's nuclear family. After her death, she continues to watch over her world from a dreamlike place in between Earth and Heaven. Susie's personal heaven was probably exactly what a teenager from the 70's would have imagined. It was very flower-power. She watches as her family grieves and struggle to hold together. Her father, Jack (Mark Wahlburg) copes by trying to find Susie's killer. (This by the way, is never a mystery to the audience) Her mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz) fights the need to escape her grief by escaping her husband and family. Susie watches as her younger sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver) lives the adolescence she never got to experience. She watches as her murderer dodges the detective's investigations.

I'm making this movie seem really dark. Oh it was dark-very dark- in places. We're talking about a young girl being stalked, raped, and murdered by a very disturbed neighbor. The problem was the movie didn't stay that way. We bounced back and forth between the drama of the real world and the whimsical fantasy of Susie's heaven. We even have Susie whispering this sugary, sweet, sentimental poetry-narration throughout the film. There is this great character, Grandma Lyn played by Susan Sarandon. This lady is an eccentric alcoholic who falls asleep holding onto her cigarettes. I suppose as comedy relief, the middle of the film has an entire Grandma Lyn montage. It was hilarious, but it was as if the whole section found its way into this movie by accident. After going back and forth so abruptly between dark and sentimental, I never knew what I was supposed to feel...so I stopped caring.

As I mentioned before, I was ready for this movie to be over 45 minutes before it ended. So many scenes seemed to drag on. Most of the scenes involving Susie's dream world were unnecessary. I'm sure they were nice to read about, but they just did not fit in with the rest of the film. However, I do want to mention again that the acting on everyone's part was fine. Especially Stanley Tucci. I didn't even realize that it was him until I looked it up. I completely understand why he was nominated for the Golden Globe.

This seems to be the case of a movie with an identity crisis. It felt like Jackson was trying to take what could have been an emotional family drama and turn it into an epic of Lord of the Ring proportions (there were enough special effects to make you think so). At times, the movie wanted to be whimsical and funny in a sappy sort of way and at times, it wanted to be a dark tale of grief. Unfortunately, the mood changes weren't smooth enough to make this movie anything other than confused.