"The Lovely Bones"
(2009, Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand)
Average Contributor Rating:

A couple of weeks ago, Where the Wild Things Are was released. It presented an emotional, raw, honest portrayal of life for a nine-year-old, full of contradictions and mood swings, frustrations brought on by an immaturity one isn’t ready to shake but has to if one wants to be ‘accepted’. Now, Peter Jackson’s latest film, The Lovely Bones, is released. A film about a dead fourteen-year-old girl who observes from limbo as her family, friends and killer deal with her being raped and murdered, The Lovely Bones’dead protagonist is a more likeable person than Where the Wild Things Are’s Max. However, that doesn’t make her make her more real or more relatable; in fact, she’s the dead opposite (no pun intended). While The Lovely Bones doesn’t exactly set out to present a film about childhood – its thematic interests lie elsewhere – it’s a worrisome thing when the child protagonist feels unreal. Unlike Max, Susie Salmon isn’t someone we knew or were. She’s a meticulously constructed being, her speech affected and false and her emotions obvious and simplistic. Unfortunately, Alice Sebold left the construction site as soon as she finished on Susie, it seems, and the extensive scaffolding is all too noticeable as a result. Susie’s existence as a creation, rather than a person, serves as the film’s chief flaw, and it is from her which all other flaws spring.

The film begins with an introduction to our young heroine before her life is cruelly taken by one of her neighbours, and it’s as early as here that the cracks begin to show. Saoirse Ronan is probably one of the best young actresses working in the West right now, but her valiant work only serves to show how basic a character Susie is. There’s no sense of any depth or any character underlying  Sebold’s simple ‘details’ that, really, could be applied to any number of fourteen year old girls. In fact, when Susie is eventually murdered and becomes our window to the world she left behind, her role in the film is confirmed as being just that – a window. She’s a vessel for the audience to inhabit and observe from, a shell with clearly etched-out ‘characteristics’ that may be sympathetic, but is never truly emotionally engaging. This sadly means that any scene in Susie’s ‘inbetween’ feels like padding, and the meat of the film lies not in Susie’s attempts to move on from her death, but in her family’s, friends’ and killer’s attempts to do the same. Even though a couple of those characters aren’t as strongly developed as they should be – Susie’s high school crush, her grandmother and her killer among them – they’re still far more engaging than Susie herself, and the ways they deal with death add a necessary and much-needed depth to the film.

In fact, it’s back in the real world that the film actually succeeds. Rachel Weisz and Michael Imperioli give characteristically good performances as the beleaguered mother and the harried cop assigned to Susie’s case, and Mark Wahlberg proves yet again that he just needs a good director to whip him into shape. Their characters build walls around themselves as the hope of finding Susie’s killer wanes, retreating into worlds far removed from the ‘reality’, and all three actors sell this excellently. These metaphorical walls mirror Susie’s manipulation of her ‘inbetween’, and while Jackson renders that ‘inbetween’ in captivating colours and stunning imagery, it’s the metaphorical worlds of her family that are more emotionally engaging and impressive. The star of the film, however, is Stanley Tucci as Susie’s murderer. While his character’s appearance may be horrifically clichéd – horn-rimmed glasses, paedophile moustache, comb-over, bad dress sense – Tucci moves beyond that and makes the core of this man something both terrifying and enthralling. He’s a monster with a psychopathic need to kill, but there’s never any sense that he’s unreal – he is a chillingly believable figure and most of the scenes with him in it are almost unbearably tense. Like everyone else, though, he builds worlds to escape from the harsh reality of his existence, but where the other characters build their worlds after tragedy, Tucci’s character builds his to create them. It’s an interesting parallel, and Jackson and Sebold expand on it surprisingly well, with the scene in which Wahlberg helps Tucci build a blind for duck hunting a superlative example of thematic delivery, on top of being a tense bit of filmmaking.

The Lovely Bones is a competent film. Peter Jackson’s direction is excellent, as per usual, and the acting is uniformly great. The film also has some surprisingly astute observations on how we deal with tragedy and the cages we trap ourselves in after a tragic event, and it delivers these without feeling overly trite or tired. However, for a film that finds a significant chunk of its heart in the trials and tribulations of a recently-deceased teenaged girl, there’s nowhere near enough to that girl to make the film as effective as it should be. .AG.
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