The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is a grating and unlikeable film. One reason for this is illustrated by a sequence near its start when, as it attempts to establish the context of the tale, we are shown an episode in which Susie borrows the red family convertible to rush her choking brother, in stunt-driver speed and style, toward hospital. The point of this is to emphasise the dull normality of her suburban life. In movie-world, of course, this sort of happening is par for the course. But if this really were normal life and this really happened to a normal teenager, it would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them or anyone they knew. Susie would still be reliving it as she walked through the cornfield months later where is met by the man who entices her into a den before murdering her a short way into the movie.

In other words, the choking episode fails completely to achieve its supposed purpose. And the rest of the film equally fails to convince. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz as Susie’s parents – the former bent on uncovering his daughter’s killer, the latter on the run from her grief – perform well. The generally high standard of acting and superb production values, as well as one particularly tense scene in which Susie’s sister breaks into the killer’s home, give us a glimpse into what could be a decent thriller - were it not for the awful nonsense that constantly invades the drama on earth in the form of Susie’s semi-departed spirit.

For Susie spends the few years over which the action takes place flitting between exploring an afterlife elsewhere – consisting largely of a computer-generated cornfield and a bandstand – and watching the aftermath of her death unfold back on earth. We are given very little insight into the structure of this afterlife or its relationship to the real world, and so it seems flimsy and unsatisfying – an impression strengthened by the lurid cartoony visuals of Susie’s heaven. The afterlife sequences are therefore an unwelcome intrusion into the rest of the action rather than, as is presumably intended, the basis from which we identify with Susie, helping us view events back on earth through her eyes.

The story, for what it’s worth, follows Susie’s discoveries about her afterlife and its other inhabitants in parallel with her family members’ various efforts to identify her killer, cope with their grief, and grow up around Susie’s absence: these paths forming the figurative ‘lovely bones’ which grow around the hole Susie's death left behind. That metaphor is a good guide to the movie itself: it seems to aim at something profound and meaningful but misses, coming over as clumsy and confused.

To be fair to Peter Jackson, the source material is no better. Many critics have noted that the novel is almost unfilmable, but few if any seem to share my opinion: that the project was doomed not just because the novel had elements difficult to translate between literature and the screen, but because the novel itself is irritating, unconvincing, and would have been better left alone.

Official site, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert review, Andrew Collins review (scroll down).