The Lovely Bones
By Megan Carroll
Remember your grandmother’s or mother’s patchwork quilt? All those random pieces would come together to create a beautiful visual pattern. Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones looks like one of those quilts, but feels more like an awkward patchwork.
Based on the beloved novel by Alice Sebold, we take a journey through the eyes of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year old girl who was raped and murdered by a serial killer. Susie spends most of the film in the “in-between” which is an ever-changing psychedelic landscape of nature. Mix this with the over-the-top 70s fashions that dominate the eye and you are transported into a film experience that feels dreamlike and disconnected. You feel lost at times and I wonder if this was what Jackson and director of photography Andrew Lesnie intended.
Unfortunately, the story was lost in all of the overpowering images and Jackson asks something of his audience that is way too farfetched: A 14 year old girl was raped and murdered. This is something pretty horrific, but the audience doesn’t seem to have the opportunity to connect emotionally. Susie’s mother (Rachel Weisz) and father (Mark Wahlberg) should be in a state of utter loss, but both seem void of any real emotion as Susie stumbles through the lonely in-between. It seems that Mark Wahlberg’s character was lost in the in-between with Susie; moving in a sleepy and tired manner which reinforces the lack of emotion within the film.
Jackson then wants us to believe that the perverted serial killer (Stanley Tucci), who wheels around homemade dollhouses, is never seen as a suspect. Really? A single, middle-aged man who makes dollhouses for little girls is interviewed by the police and forgotten. It makes no sense.
Another aspect of the film which requires too much from the audience is a strange teen romance between Susie and an older student. There is no background to make this believable for the audience. They have a few interactions and we are expected to believe that there is such a strong bond between the two that he actually “sees” her as she projects herself from the in-between to receive her first kiss.
Mixed-up in with all of these other speculative and emotionless stories is Jackson’s idea of comic relief: a cheeky grandmother played by Susan Sarandon. It is misguided and, like the rest of the film, a dusting of what the film might have been if it had the requisite depth required for believability.
The film Lovely Bones is empty and shallow; just a shadow of the wonderful book from which it sprang.
