THE LOVELY BONES (Peter Jackson 2010)

[Chris Knipp]

SUSIE (SAOIRSE RONAN) AND RAY SINGH (REESE RITCHIE) MAKE A DATE SHE CAN'T KEEP

Peter Jackson: THE LOVELY BONES (2010)

Heaven can wait

Review by Chris Knipp

Saoirse Ronan (an Oscar nominee for her supporting role in Atonement) is excellent as 14-year-old Susie Salmon, a Pennsylvania schoolgirl murdered by a serial killer in the early Seventies in this inexplicable and overblown adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller. Peter Jackson has drifted a long way from his early study of wild young girls, Heavenly Creatures. He's too addicted to grandiose productions now, from the Rings Trilogy to King Kong, to adopt a style suitable to the delicate details of this story about adolescent longings and family sorrow whose beyond-the-grave narrative blends supernatural thriller and police procedural. A.V. Club writers Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias have suggested the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher, Morvern Caller) ought to have done it. True: working small with a keen understanding of a young person's mindset as Ramsey might have done is clearly what was needed to make something you'd remember out of this material. Instead this elaborate production is all over the place and nothing subtle or distinctive has survived it.

In the novel, the girl is already dead and narrates events before, during, and after the crime from an in-between realm where she's lodged because she's not ready to move on to heaven yet. And here is where big trouble starts. What's mainly just a narrative voice in the book becomes in Jackson's version a distractingly overproduced greeting card location combining Hallmark images with those used as the opening signatures of certain American movie production companies. Susie just needs to linger on till some loose ends get tied up, such as the grief of her parents and the need for her killer to be punished. (In the book he also raped her but the movie chooses to omit that detail. This is a surprising change given that rape is an important part of novelist Sebald's own experience and figures prominently in two of her three novels to date.) Susie also needs to follow around Ray Singh (Reese Ritchie), a boy at school who asked her on a first date the day she was lured to her death. She wants to have that first kiss she missed in life. And Ray, with his teased-out hair and nice jacket, is indeed a real Seventies honey. One way the elaborate production is successful and fun is its Seventies look. There's even something appealingly Seventies about the police investigator as played by The Sopranos' Michael Imperiali.

Stanley Tucci is appropriately creepy, unrecognizable in a wig and unlike any character he's played before as the serial killer George Harvey, who goes unnoticed at first because he's a near neighbor. The other cast members come across as only slightly above TV movie-of-the-week level. Mark Wahlberg is one-note earnest and anguished as the father, Rachel Weisz bland and wasted as the mom, Susan Sarandon briefly amusing but unnecessary as the "quaintly" alcoholic visiting grandmom who comes to "help" when Susie disappears. Sarendon's best sequences are, typically, just a quick but over-dressed collage: the movie gives us a barrage of images to deal with, many of them unnecessary. Even Saoirse Ronan's omnipresent voiceover, for all its conviction, is insufficient to hold things together. Events get so complicated and are run through such a relentless visual blender that the creepiness gets mixed up with the sweetness and it all starts to turn creepy.

Where the movie goes over the top is in its elaborately staged and excessively drawn-out pseudo-Hitchcockian cross-cutting sequences that alternate excruciatingly to the point of exhaustion between one scene and another, starting with a back-and-forth between the vividly sick-making sequence of Harvey luring Susie into his underground lair beneath a cornfield and the sweaty one of her worried family at home having an uneasy dinner. But the editing tricks begin long before that, blending in scenes from past and present, action sequences with flashed-in Instamatic shots by Susie the camera bug, giving us so much more than we need to see and so much less than we need to feel.

The practical problem the screenplay must confront is that we know early on who the killer is, and the only uncertainty is when he'll be detected. Suspense is generated by having Susie's younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) break into Harvey's house, not knowing where he is. Jack (dad Wahlberg) also gets suspicious and confronts the bad guy, another edgy scene. Finally, however, reality seems increasingly not to matter as events get ever more complex and unnatural, ending in a sequence when Harvey and a dump attendant roll a heavy metal safe toward a sink hole, as we watch Ray and a new girlfriend watching them and Susie jumping in and out of the real world from her purgatorial perch. Harvey might have driven up closer to that hole and made moving the safe over to it a whole lot easier and faster, but that would have made the process too brief for the cross-cutting with other locations to work out. All this contrivance, when surely what matters is the anger and sadness, which somehow must take second or third place.

The movie is not unwatchable; it's enlivened by Saoirse Ronan's conviction and depth. Wahlberg works so hard at being a sweet bereaved dad it's endearing at times, even though he's never quite real. But The Lovely Bones is sucked down into its own sink hole when the finale grinds out an unsatisfying end for the villain mixed with Susie's long delayed exit amid choirs of angels and big screen Hallmark. In retrospect this movie is a collage of scenes that could be from many different movies, none good. An interesting novel has been turned into a creepy death fantasy for adolescent girls still hungry for blood after the Twilight series.

In wide release in the US from January 15, 2010.

[cinemabon]

Great review, Chris. Peter Jackson has wanted to make this film for a long time, even as he shot Lord of the Rings. (He, his wife, and the third partner to their trilogy relationship, Phillipa, wrote the screenplay). Roger Ebert slammed this film. Other critics have as well. I don't think it has good legs. Look for it to drop off quickly. Cream of the crop gave it 32% approval (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1189...itic=creamcrop), Metacritic gave it a slightly higher 42% (http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/lovelybones). I can't imagine what a "drawn-out pseudo-Hitchcock cross-cutting sequence" looks like unless you are referring to his style of cutting from the shower sequence in "Psycho." I believe Ebert's objections arise from moral grounds, such as the glorification of the afterlife and its impact on teenage girls: "The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to." (Roger Ebert's review from the Chicago Sun-Times) Here is the link to that review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/...IEWS/100119992

I liked Jackson's work in LOTR and was one of the few who enjoyed his version of King Kong. However, after reading your review and a few others, I believe I'll pass.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks. I thought Hitchcockian crosscutting was famous. Anyway if you watch the film you'll see what I mean about this overworked and overdone device, starting with the tediously obvious crosscutting between the seduction of Susie by Harvey and her family having dinner and growing anxious about her absence. . Ebert has a point, but that might be a criticism of the book as well as the film, except that the film distorts all such elements by blowing them up more. I would advise anyone who's interested in filmmaking to see this movie. We learn as much from failures as from successes, maybe more, and this is an interesting failure, worth careful study.

[oscar jubis]

I can't imagine what a "drawn-out pseudo-Hitchcock cross-cutting sequence" looks like unless you are referring to his style of cutting from the shower sequence in "Psycho." (cinemabon)
I thought Hitchcockian crosscutting was famous. Anyway if you watch the film you'll see what I mean about this overworked and overdone device, starting with the tediously obvious crosscutting between the seduction of Susie by Harvey and her family having dinner and growing anxious about her absence. (Chris Knipp)

*The shower sequence in Psycho does not involve any cross-cutting, which usually consists of alternating between shots happening at two or more distinct spaces to convey that they are occurring at the same time. One example of the use of cross-cutting in a Hitchcock film would be the alternation of shots of Guy's tennis match and Bruno's attempts to retrieve a lighter from a drain pipe in Strangers on a Train . The use of cross-cutting in Psycho occurs when Lila sneaks into the Bates house while Sam and Norman Bates have a discussion at the motel office. These are not the only instances of cross-cutting in Hitchcock's films. If that were a fact, one would say Hitchcock tends to avoid using this editing technique because it had been used routinely since the 1900s. The term is usually associated with Griffith, who saw it used in rudimentary form in Pathe and Vitagraph one-reelers and perfected the use of it in films like A Drunkard's Reformation (1909). Just about every filmmaker since then has used cross-cutting. Hitchcock included, but not more so than most.

I believe Ebert's objections arise from moral grounds, such as the glorification of the afterlife and its impact on teenage girls: "The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to."

This sentence seems to me exemplary of film criticism that somehow attempts to refer simultaneously to a film and the literary text it is based on.
Strictly speaking, in the film there is no evidence that the killer has killed before, although it is implied that he plans to kill again. So, when Ebert uses the term "serial killer" (perhaps not the only critic who uses it) he is perhaps referring to the character in the book not in the film. This is a minor issue. However, there is clearly no evidence in the film that Susie was raped. Jackson decided not to show the murder and not to make any mention of rape whatsoever. I believe that criticism should be faithful to what it is a criticism of. If rape was implied by the exchange between Susie and the killer that we see (an exchange that is characterized as a "seduction" by CK in his response post but accurately described as a "luring" in his review) then Ebert should say so and not simply pretend that what happens to Susie in the book is equivalent to what happens in the movie. Ebert is being dismissive of Jackson's artistic choices in the process of adaptation. As to the substance of Ebert's objection, I think the murder of Susie is treated with the proper gravity. Perhaps Ebert is uncomfortable, as I am, with the idea that there is a soul that survives the death of the body and/or that such entity can travel back and forth between the world-we-know and the "other-world".

[Chris Knipp]

Oscar,

I indeed am always thinking of the cross-cutting between Bruno and Guy in Strangers on a Train and definitely not Psycho whenever I refer to this method of generating suspense. I didn't know if it was the classic example or not, but it's a favorite of mine. If Hitchcock is not particularly the one most associated with cross-cutting, I personally associate him with the skillful manufactoring of suspense, sometimes using cross-cutting.

Of course in silent film "montage" (which in French simply means film "editing") itself often means cutting back and forth to generate an emotional reaction, as in the famous moon-and-eye-cutting sequence of Dali/Bunuel's Un chien andalu ; the Odessa Steps Sequence in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is another. These are editing to cut back and forth not to contrast two independent (though related) sequences of events but to build emotion and show reaction while within the same film location. It's all editing of film to cut back and forth and generate an emotion in the viewer.

My point is that Jackson, or his editor in The Lovely Bones, overdoes the technique, and repeatedly and laboriously. This is the main point. Given that this is an old and time-honored technique and that he uses it in a standard way, the obviousness and excess are the more glaring.

Good point about the Ebert remark. It is always essential to note if one is criticizing a film's content especially on moral grounds that one refers to something added by the filmmakers to the original material; otherwise, it should be stated as a criticism of the book source and one should not hold the filmmaker reesponsible. However:

Strictly speaking, in the film there is no evidence that the killer has killed before, although it is implied that he plans to kill again. So, when Ebert uses the term "serial killer" (perhaps not the only critic who uses it) he is perhaps referring to the character in the book not in the film.

I don't know where you got that idea. It is stated that Harvey is getting the "old itch" and wants to kill again, but it's also made clear that he has killed six or eight or ten times and the victims are described, and later shown gathering in heaven or in "the in-between" waiting to bring Susie along to heaven. I have not read the book. I agree "lured" is a better word than "seduction" for the film event; I was very conscious that the film left out the rape, as well as not showing the actual murder, only the disposal of the body, which in the story was dismembered. Sebold, herself the victim of a violent and abusive rape, described the event in much more vivid and disturbing terms.

Perhaps Ebert is uncomfortable, as I am, with the idea that there is a soul that survives the death of the body and/or that such entity can travel back and forth between the world-we-know and the "other-world".

Well, that isn't in any well-known system of beliefs so it might make just about anybody uncomfortable, or, in my case, simply seem hokey and too preposterous to take seriously. However from reading analyses of the movie by some who've read the book I suspect in the novel it's all handled in a subtler, more understated way and so works better; even the "Users" on IMDb seem unanimous on this and feel Jackson & Co. made a hash of a good book in a whole host of ways, starting with bowdlerizing it.

[oscar jubis]

It is made clear that he has killed six or eight or ten times and the victims are described, and later shown gathering in heaven or in "the in-between" waiting to bring Susie along to heaven.
I was in error. It's clear.
My point is that Jackson, or his editor in The Lovely Bones, overdoes the technique, and repeatedly and laboriously.
That is what I thought during the dumping of the safe. I had not thought so up to that point.

[Chris Knipp]

Overdone cross-cutting

I myself thought of it very much also during the initial main sequence of cross-cutting: it was heavy-handed; crude; simplistic. However it becomes all the more obviously so (to an absurd point) in the safe-dumping sequence.

Your misreading the previous victims is excusable due to how confused and hokey the elaborate editing in of the "in-between" sequences is. There is so much unnecessary and labored playing around with film editing that it's hard to keep clear what's doing on and remember the images. However, in a way the other victims are made excessively clear rather than glossed over.

[Chris Knipp]

A truth universally acknowledged.

From reading User's comments on IMDb I am more and more aware that while The Lovely Bones the movie is clearly a bad movie in itself, it becomes all the worse when seen by someone who has read and appreciated the novel, which many have. But that I couldn't include in my review because I've not read it. From IMDb User MovieAddict2010 from UK:

For major studios, January is considered "dumping grounds" -- a time to toss aside the aborted Oscar contenders or latest Eddie Murphy comedy. Jackson's movie was originally set for release at the end of 2009, in time for the awards season, but was delayed a wider expansion after disastrous test screenings and subsequently scathing reviews. One of the film's final shots is of a character discarding an unwanted object into a big hole in the ground, burying it from existence -- it's hard not to see the irony.

I have rarely seen a movie more universally condemned in IMDb User Reviews. Quite a few have read the book and the others are Peter Jackson fans. It seems he has a disaster on his hands that will be hard to escape from. Obviously starting out to make a movie his daughter could watch about a daughter who's raped and murdered made for an ill-conceived project from the get-go. I can only praise Jackson for his weight loss. He certainly looks great and when I read about his diet I went right out and bought a box of Muelli.

[oscar jubis]

I would like to call attention to crosscutting between shots of scenes taking place not only at different locations but also at different times. The use of cross-cutting in Griffith's Intolerance (1916) is built around the idea that human beings have failed to make progress, from a moral standpoint, throughout the span of millenniums. This is perhaps the most sophisticated use of cross-cutting. The shots are united by a constant idea/concept with the temporal and spatial orientation varying from shot to shot.

I agree with your assertion that The Lovely Bones is NOT unwatchable.I don't want to engage in a thorough defense of the film but I found it worth-watching for a number of reasons. I liked the protagonic performance and I liked the characterizations of her whole family and the handling of the theme of grief. I would also like to point out how difficult it is to visualize "heaven" or the "afterlife" in ways that a majority of viewers find satisfying. My eye found those images quite pleasing even though I recognize these scenes don't work dramatically.

[Chris Knipp]

I complimented the actress who plays Susie too. Your example of cross-cutting across different times does sound interesting but i can't visualize it. If you found the images of heaven "pleasing" then you have very different taste from mine. They are (to quote various IMDb user reviews) "overlong and overwrought," "some funkadelic Acid Heaven," generally in short something overproduced and overdone. As I said they look like movie production logo intros or kitsch greeting cards, and seem woozy and in bad taste -- far from the quality of Jackson's rich Lord of the Rings landscapes. Perhaps some of the images might have worked; but there is too much of them. Your comment that you sympathized with the grief ill fits with the general users' reactioin that the film is too laborious and overwrought to be emotionally inovlving, and most seem to agree that Sarandon is a caracature, Wahlberg a bad actor, Tucci inconsistent, Rachel Weisz wasted and too much absent; in fine, none of the characters is well developed or has any depth. Susie? Well developed perahps, but not profoundly so, and after all, she's a 14-year-old girl just discovering herself when her life ends.

[oscar jubis]

I read your reviews and every Filmleaf post. Otherwise, I read very little non-academic film criticism nowadays. I did find the film too "laborious" and Sarandon's character somewhat "caricatured". I don't feel inclined to defend the film even if I disliked it less or liked it a bit more than most critics.Instead I will post something in the Rohmer thread soon.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm glad at least we got into some details of editing technique. But the merits aren't worth debating and you'd have to debate them with somebody other than me. It's a disaster when one looks at its elements; the watching isn't torture as it can be in disasters.

[oscar jubis]

There is a landscape with a single tree seen in long-shot. Suddenly the leaves on the tree begin to separate from it and fly in formation like a flock of birds. There is also a field of tall yellow grasses that sways rhythmically. Then they turn into sea currents that move in the same pattern as the grasses. I found these scenes quite beautiful. Also, I was moved by Susie's longing for that mythic first kiss. The Lovely Bones is not a good film overall but there are things in it or aspects of it that I enjoyed.

[cinemabon]

"Michael Ritzi, will you be baptized?"

Blam!

"I will..."

Blam!

"Do you renounce satan?"

Blam!

"I do..."

[Howard Schumann]

THE LOVELY BONES
Directed by Peter Jackson (2009)

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones is a tribute to youthful innocence and the resilience of a family in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Based on the best-selling 2002 novel of the same name by Alice Sebold, the film is set in suburban Pennsylvania during the 1970s, recapturing a time of relative sanity in society when people, exhausted by the political activism of the 60s, began to look inward to gain insight into their true nature. Susie Salmon, a 14-year old girl, enchantingly performed by Saoirse Ronan ("Atonement"), is supported by a devoted family, has a talent for photography, and a crush on an Indian student Ray whom she desperately wants to kiss her.

All this comes to a premature end, however, when she is lured to an underground bunker and murdered by sullen neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) when crossing a cornfield on the way home from school, ending all her dreams of love, children, and career in a brutal instant. As what many mediums and psychics call a disembodied spirit, a traumatized soul who cannot let go and move on, Susie narrates the film from a sort of limbo somewhere south of heaven, relating key occurrences of her childhood and the happy days she spent growing up.

Sadly, she also recounts the events that led to her death in excruciating detail as the camera dramatizes her words on the screen. Now seeking revenge for her murder, she reaches out to her family from beyond the grave, leaving clues pointing to Harvey as the killer, and stealing a kiss from her wannabe boyfriend Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie).

Although the film is particularly skimpy on the relationship between Susie's dad Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and her mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) and the reason for their breakup, it is solid on several important levels: the trauma of sudden death and the impact it has on a family, the struggle to move on versus the need to get even, and the continuance of life after death. Performances are outstanding, especially that of young Ronan who is sweet, innocent, full of life, and a charismatic presence. Equally powerful are the performances of Tucci as the serial killer who is the poster boy for the banality of evil, Wahlberg as the intense father who obsessively seeks the identity of his daughter's killer while criticizing the detective, Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) for not doing more to solve the case.

Also strong is the reliable Rachel Weisz, Susie's depressed mother who seeks to block the tragedy from her mind by leaving home to pick fruit in California, Rose McIver as Susie's sister Lindsey, an athletic middle school student, and Susan Sarandon as Susie's boozy grandmother who takes control of the household when things begin to fall apart. Unfortunately, the characters are paper-thin constructs that have no life outside of their limited role in forwarding the script.

The film has been criticized as well for its over-reliance on CGI effects to depict a colorful, surreal afterlife filled with eye-popping images of bright colorful skies, mountains, and waters where people actually seem to be happy. Jackson's afterworld, however, in my view, is not meant to objectify the hereafter but simply to model Susie's subjective dreamscape, mirroring her purity and innocence as well as her loneliness and agitation in completing her unfinished business on Earth.

Though "The Lovely Bones" has scenes of incredible beauty, it also has moments of brutal violence and a theme of hate-filled revenge that undercuts its message of redemption. Although it does convey the timeless quality of the human spirit, its journey and its purpose with delicacy and intelligence, the film falls short of being a truly magical experience because it does not consider the role of forgiveness and love as an important element in healing, yes even for those who do harm. It is nonetheless a work of sincerity and passion, guided by a director who is willing to take chances to say something meaningful beyond the typical Hollywood product and one who largely succeeds in touching our heart.

GRADE: B+