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Over the last decade, director Peter Jackson has made a name for himself by directing grand, effects-heavy, larger-than-life adventures. He’s earned himself a few Oscars in the process, too. So when, after three Lord of the Rings movies and a King Kong remake, Jackson decided to direct an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones, it seemed like an odd choice. And now that I’ve seen it, well, it still seems like an odd choice.
Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) thought she had her whole life ahead of her. But then, on her way home from school one afternoon, she stopped to chat with a man from her neighborhood—and she was never seen again.
After her brutal murder, Susie finds herself caught between the world she left behind and the one that’s waiting for her. Though she knows that she’s supposed to move on, she still finds herself looking back, watching over her the family she left behind.
As Susie watches, her family struggles to come to terms with her death. And while her mother (Rachel Weisz) tries to forget, her father (Mark Wahlberg) becomes obsessed with finding her killer.
While The Lovely Bones starts out as a haunting and even suspenseful drama, it loses its eerie appeal once Susie arrives in the “in-between.” Obviously eager to use his special effects proficiency to create this magical world, Jackson fills the film with long, dream-like sequences that really serve no purpose. They may look cool—and I’m sure they required a top-notch effects team and some state-of-the-art equipment—but they serve only as a distraction. In fact, Jackson gets so caught up in his effects-heavy flourishes that he leaves his living characters in the lurch.
Like Susie, we watch the Salmon family from afar—seeing them, but never really feeling them. We’re shown only scattered bits and pieces of their story—not nearly enough to get to know the characters or to share in their grief. That’s unfortunate, too—because the film has such a talented cast, yet they’re shamefully underused. Given the opportunity, this noteworthy cast could have made The Lovely Bones a poignantly beautiful film. Instead, they simply plod along, doing the best they can with the little they were given. Wahlberg’s character is the only one with a hint of personality, but he’s confined to just one note. The rest of the characters are hollow, little more than shadows of real people.
With a gifted cast and director with an eye for fantasy, The Lovely Bones could have been a moving and magical drama. But Jackson focused so much attention on making it lovely that he completely forgot to give it bones.
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