The Lovely Bones
In a recent television interview, Peter Jackson said that CGI in film has come as far as it is going to, and that filmmakers should return to telling stories.
Presumably his desire to render a human-scale story is what attracted Jackson to this film - that and the fact that Alice Sebold’s novel gives him the opportunity to greedily jam it full of as much computer generated imagery as he can get away with.
Saoirse Ronan plays the murdered Susie Salmon, who is just coming into the first exciting flushes of maturity when she is killed on a walk home from school. What follows is the parallel course of two grief processes; the unfolding of her family’s coming to terms with her death and her own mourning for her loss of self and a place in the corporeal world. Meanwhile, her father and sister are beginning to suspect a neighbour and Susie is doing all she can to see they get their man.
Ronan’s meticulously natural performance and beguiling presence helps to keep her at the centre of the film. Unfortunately, she spends most of it constrained in a cartoonish purgatory from where she tries to influence the detective story unfolding back in reality. Her netherworld is a fantasy of billowing wheat fields and isolated lighthouses that might have been more effectively claustrophobic if it had taken place entirely within a bare white room, or at least with minimal effects.
The afterlife is supposed to be the realm of a teenage girl’s emotions, but short of a giant beach-ball it ends up featureless and barren in an unintended way. It seems clumsy of Jackson to try and conjure the modern spirituality of femininity and what we end up with is saccharine and unimaginative. Susie shares this place with an infuriating Nikki SooHoo, who hams her way through some revolting lines so inelegant that she and the scriptwriters seem to be conspiring to wreck her career before it begins. It is almost enough to make you sympathise with the serial killer, of whose victims she is one.
That killer is another of the film’s strengths, played by Stanley Tucci, with wonderfully understated creepiness running thick under a veneer of respectability sufficiently believable as to lend some credence to the conceit that he has gained trust amongst his neighbours. He occupies a realm of the film that is more subtly dressed. Its opening action relies on the same subtle nostalgia that drives Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (courtesy of costume designer Nancy Steiner, who also worked on that film). However, Susie’s heart throb (played by Reece Ritchie) is a damp squib and Mark Wahlberg’s concerned and desperate father has none of the warmth and paternity that is later meant to drive his fervent quest to solve the mystery of his daughter’s murder. In fact, his switch from father to detective is indiscernible.
This is a rag tag of a film, with a few strong threads holding it together, but holes that are all too obvious, and anomalies like Susan Sarandon as the hard drinking grandmother who seems to drive straight from the end of Thelma And Louise and into this production. Jackson may be trying to earn his credentials as a director of pensive movies, but he can’t seem to scale down.
Released in cinemas on 19th February 2010 by DreamWorks.
Written by Huw Green.
