"The Lovely Bones"
Drama
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Release date: January 15th, 2010
Reviewed by: John Esther
Grade:


High minded by Brian Eno's musical treatments, the newest film by Peter Jackson bounces up and down between intelligence and idiocy with the latter outweighing the former in irritating measure.

Making great strides in acting since her wildly overpraised performance in director Joe Wright's Atonement, the highly-photogenic Saoirse Ronan plays 14-year-old Susie Salmon. Born in the late 1950s, raised during the 1960s, and hitting puberty in the early 1970s, Susie is a good girl living in a good home, helping her dad, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), construct boats insides bottles; playing rivalry with her younger sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver); and saving her brother, Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale) from death.

A good daughter, a hero, and also a little shutterbug who flutters around snapping shots of the extraordinary world of suburban Pennsylvania through a young girl's eyes, poor little Susie will be murdered shortly.

Between the beyond-the-grave announcement of her impending doom and the time the dastardly deed is done by a neighbor of the family (Stanley Tucci), the film continues to build tremendous momentum toward what could be director/co-writer/co-producer Peter Jackson's best film since the great Heavenly Creatures (1994).

Unfortunately, once The Lovely Bones reaches her tragic death, the film starts messing around with a combination of spiritus mundi, new age mumbo jumbo, and middlebrow metaphysical mediation.

Rather than head off to heaven, Susie chooses to stay in "the blue horizon." A beautiful, magical midway station between heaven and earth, the blue horizon is a place most humans would probably find far more preferable than the one they inhabit, especially for all those depressed teenagers here on terra firma.

Thanks to this angelic presence of Susie, Jack is obsessed with finding his daughter's killer. By day he is an unhappy accountant, at night a highly amateurish sleuth who suspects everyone, especially those whose tax returns offer clues. This behavior of Jack's annoys Det. Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) while driving his wife, Abigail Salmon (Rachel Weisz), away from home.

Fortunately, effete and effeminate Grandma Lynn (a wonderful Susan Sarandon) is around to keep house. We are told Grandma Lynn is usually wrong but that does not stop the family from allowing the boozy floozy "35-year-old" matriarch from taking over house affairs, perhaps finally getting to be the mother she never was to Abigail.

As the tension mounts between letting the past go and justice prevailing there are signs the film will shine some light on the frequent irresponsibility of fantasy, vengeance and misguided self pity found in storytelling. When it does, there is a great amount of relief...albeit short term. For every quick satisfactory moment in The Lovely Bones is arch-backed and arrowed with an elongated period of reinforcing the very immature ideas the film has been building up, only to take down. Yet the imbecilic edifice weeds its way back up. One glaring example is the way Lindsey discovers and offers proof of the serial killer (he has killed many others besides Susie). The film plays it off as a triumph but any first-year criminal attorney would have the evidence thrown out of court. Subsequently any other evidence would be tossed as well. Of course, the film dares not tread down that path for pity's sake.

It is an exacerbating narrative reaching its anti-intellectual climax with Susie getting one last moment with her newfound senior-class beau, Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), a la the clairvoyant Ruth Conners (Carolyn Dando) a la Molly Jensen (Demi Moore) in that idiotic, reactionary, Oscar-winning film, Ghost (1990). To add insult to misery, the film peters off the climactic scene with scenes -- short and long -- of divine retribution, pro-teenage pregnancy, the nuclear family reunited for the future, and one of the most manipulatively mawkish final comments in any film this decade.

No doubt there are some beautifully stark and dark images here regarding the loss of innocence for both children and parents (whose actors don terrible wigs throughout the film) -- maybe this is why Grandma Lynn handles Susie's death better than anyone? -- and please do not argue this is commentary on the loss of American innocence in the Vietnam/Watergate era (neither event is even mentioned in the film) -- vis-a-vis the unexpected, horrific violence far too many families encounter and endure in this country.

However, the affection for fantastic imagery squanders the storyline. In Heavenly Creatures, where two teenager girls (Melanie Lynsky and Kate Winslet in her groundbreaking role) kill one of their mothers (Sarah Peirse), the imagination of director and character serve to propel the story. But, in The Lovely Bones, Jackson and too many over-budgeted film departments are obsessed with spectacle. Clearly Jackson has not shed his Lord of the Rings film trilogy and King Kong ways. In general, the maniacal need to create the greatest spectacle of its kind (hardly is Jackson alone here); specifically, his eurotophobia. Absence in Heavenly Creatures and rampant to hysterical heights in Lord of the Rings film trilogy, The Loving Bones has its share of various watering holes entrapping, engulfing, erasing.

Despite these shortcomings, grand and small, Brian Eno's score, the best of the year hitherto, may just be enough to make this film worth watching. Opening with his "1/1" from Music for Airports, Eno weaves some of his best songs from the early 1970s. "Third Uncle" from Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) is played to cheeky effect -- far more than a director like Jackson would have imagined -- during a rescue scene. These and other musical moments are brilliant (listen for Taking Tiger Mountain's "Great Pretender"). However, Eno swings off into supreme genius when he incrementally, with a craftsman's touch, starts bleeding notes of his "Baby's on Fire" into an ethereal crescendo during the batting Jack scene.

Lacking conviction in its vision of a world turned inside out, and eschewing the gruesome details of Alice Sebold's 2002 popular titular novel, it will be interesting to see where The Lovely Bones goes. Judging by reviews of the book, Jackson and co-writers/co-producers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens have opted for a more palatable tale (the book's rape components are omitted; dismemberment only suggested). It has the perfect blend of significant stupidity and some smarts the Academy generally adores. Eno, Sarandon, Tucci, the cinematography, the art direction, and the set direction deserve consideration. And Jackson certainly has his share of devoted fans. But with James Cameron's event, Avatar, and Terry Gilliam's superior film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on the horizon, it may dilute his base.

At any rate, Invictus and A Single Man, come out the same time, too, and they are clearly superior films.