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After the enormous successes of the epic Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Peter Jackson returns to reality (or at least closer to it) with a film strongly reminiscent of his superb earlier film Heavenly Creatures. Based on the 2002 Novel by Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones tells the story of Susie Salmon who, after being brutally murdered, witnesses the collapse of her family and the hunt for her killer from the afterlife. What results is the bizarre combination of a film that is part fantasy, drama and thriller.
Jackson’s return to Heavenly Creatures territory was something I had been looking forward to for a long time, being an enormous fan of the director’s previous work. Unfortunately, The Lovely Bones fails at almost every level to live up to these expectations. Perhaps the biggest of its failings is Jackson’s inability to merge the different aspects of the story together. Rather than creating the close relation of grand spectacle and human drama that has become the hallmark of so much of Jackson’s work, the movie feels like a confused jumble of separate elements brought together to create a single confused entity. For much of its running time it feels disjointed and uncertain of the direction that it wishes to take both thematically and in terms of storytelling.
The film does however benefit greatly from some excellent performances, most notably Saoirse Ronan’s superb portrayal of central character Susie Salmon, who successfully carries much of the film and is clearly a talent to look out for in years to come. Likewise Stanley Tucci as her cold and sinister murderer easily steals most of his scenes, earning him a well deserved Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars. However, in a bizarre sense his performance is too good as it overshadows the positive themes of renewal and recovery which the film attempts to explore. Yet this is more down to some rather disappointing acting from other members of the cast; Mark Wahlberg coming from the abominations that were Max Payne and The Happening delivers a mediocre performance as Susie’s bereaved father. The normally excellent Rachel Weisz is somewhat disappointing as her grief-stricken mother, making it hard to sympathise and connect with this family in turmoil.
The one great achievement of the film is Jackson’s depiction of the in-between, the strange afterlife which Susie inhabits for most of the film. These scenes are by far the best moments with breathtaking and imaginative shots; truly spectacular visuals that are wondrous to behold. Though easily the film's most memorable moments, they are not well integrated, and therefore fail to successfully continue the story.
Overall The Lovely Bones is not a bad film, and does offer some extraordinarily beautiful moments when we see Susie’s in-between. However it is a bad Peter Jackson film which fails to live up to expectations inevitably, being his first film in four years. While I am sure there is plenty here that fans of the novel will enjoy, for fans of Peter Jackson this is hugely disappointing – I advise watching Heavenly Creatures instead.
"The normally excellent Rachel Weisz is somewhat disappointing as her grief-stricken mother, making it hard to sympathise and connect with this family in turmoil."
Its hard to sympathise because a lot of what Rachel Weisz did in that film was cut out of the movie. She had a subplot involving the detective of the case that explain a lot of what her character was going though but it was cut out of the movie because Peter Jackson was not a competent enough director to keep that subplot in and instead of going for the reality of what Weisz's character was going though, Jackson spend more time on the Visual Effects, which made this movie unwatchable.
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