“The Lovely Bones” is a film that asks the viewer to have faith. Mostly to have faith in the human spirit, but also in the sentimental transcending the supernatural, the power of familial love, the beauty in youth granted wisdom, and of the ability of the afterlife to streamline our discoveries about our outside world.
It also asks you to have faith in darkness, in irredeemable evil, in corruption and hate and the seemingly random designation of humanity that creates somehow being totally different than what destroys. Obviously, it’s a film at war with itself, “The Lovely Bones” being a fascinating study of contradictory philosophies not uncommon to viewers of last year’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” It’s not a positive comparison.
Susie Salmon is a typical ’70s-era teen smothered by the love of her very typical household. She argues with mom and dad in between exploring her artistic endeavors, an intellectual curiosity obviously spilling over from her bibliophile of a mother. She’s a treasure, a sweetheart of a kid that, before the story kicks in, we immediately fall for, and a lot of that comes from young Saoirse Ronan (“Atonement”) who communicates with attitude and humor how she’s not a pushover, but rather an independent spirit locked in a young girl’s body.
Unfortunately, the story dictates that the life she brings to this story be snuffed out, a victim of local child killer George Harvey. In a bookish blond comb-over wig and clumsy mouthpiece, Stanley Tucci seems to be wearing a stereotypical child molester Halloween costume. He charms young Susie with his pretend-childlike wonder, and while we never know exactly what he does to her offscreen, we do see his actions result in Suzie’s dead body being placed in a burlap bag and ignored for years. During his scenes, it’s hard not to imagine Chris Hansen angrily building a time machine in his head.
With Susie’s murder, the story takes on a bifurcated structure. At home, we deal with the fallout, her mother and father (Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg) coping in their own specific ways. Father Jack buries himself in case files, dead-set on investigating family histories and mental records to find the most accurate suspect, while mother Abigail… we’re not sure how she’s reacting, although she’s an emotional wreck. Jack tries to help her by bringing in Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) and, hey, it’s time for a wacky boozing grandma montage! (and lord, (she looks like a makeup grotesque from one of Robert Aldrich’s horror melodramas like, “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”)
In the afterlife, we see Susie struggling to get a handle on what’s happened. Presumably from the source novel (though we are unfamiliar), the hook here is a fruitful one, the idea of coping with death when you are the victim. Susie goes through stages of mourning refracted by the afterlife, first unable to accept she’ll never return, and then blaming herself for what happened. Her burdens are compounded by the implicit notion that somehow, it’s her emotion that’s peeking through to the other side, subtly affecting events. We’re led to believe this comes from her failing to accept death, as it’s Susie’s flashes in the real world that lead her father and younger sister to believe that she might not be gone after all. But while the film seems geared towards her letting go of her life and accepting she’s part of a chain of life and death, what of a late third act moment that provides sloppy closure from what CGI implies is clearly her afterlife influence?
That moment ties into the question this film inadvertently asks: How much humanity is a filmmaker owed to his/her characters? Director Peter Jackson’s camera bestows love and affection towards the Salmons, showing a family testing each other’s resolve through tragedy, but never their love. Contrast that with George Harvey, who is seen devising and building traps for future young female pursuits, just the latest in an ongoing, unexplained murder spree. The film spends so much time with Harvey, but to what end? He’s given a hobby of building miniature houses, something that never comes into play during the film’s runtime except to suggest some sort of strand of arrested development. Otherwise, the camera captures him as it would a horror film monster. Tucci’s Harvey wouldn’t be at all out of place in a sleazy exploitation film, especially with the suspicious stings on the soundtrack during the moments where he overacts to break a sweat when it looks like, somehow, he may be caught. Jackson doesn’t like Harvey, in other words, and while none of us would condone murder, what’s the sense of stacking the deck against your story’s clear antagonist?
Lots of “The Lovely Bones” is like that — broad, simplistic, often garish. Jackson is in love with vertiginous dolly shots signifying motion and activity in every day events, his camera staging a family breakfast like the siege at Helm’s Deep. He’s careful to use bright lights and flattering camera angles to illuminate the Salmon clan (particularly Wahlberg, surprisingly good) , while showing Harvey’s house as a place of constant darkness, shooting him with a forced perspective or even a dutch angle to illustrate his otherworldliness as if Tucci’s literal mustache-twirling performance doesn’t do the job enough. The film begins with the herky jerky kamikaze tone, but it’s easy to settle in as it becomes clear that Susie will eventually be in danger. Unfortunately, it stays pitched at an impossibly high level, even though the plot is filled with low-key digressions like Susie’s crush finding a new love or the arrival of Grandma Lynn (and, in all fairness, there’s never a good time for a wacky boozing grandma montage). This reaches its nadir when Jack, somehow tipped off by a CGI candle flame, runs after Harvey, into a cornfield with a baseball bat, when a random teen bumps into him and beats him into submission while a Brian Eno electric guitar wails triumphantly on the soundtrack (good music choices, as in great songs, but the execution throughout is largely terrible). In case you must know, Harvey leers at this in near-masturbatory glee, his face lit up by a flashlight like a kabuki mask.
Has Jackson spent too much time on Middle Earth and Skull Island that he no longer remembers what human interactions are like? Neither the world of the Salmons nor Harvey’s inner life reflect anything in reality, and while Wahlberg and Weisz are allowed to bring optimism and affection to their roles (and Sarandon some TV-level guff), Tucci is clearly a monster. The hope is that the CGI-loaded afterlife will be more to Jackson’s strengths, but that too is a candy-coated misfire, at best the embodiment of a lazy child’s imagination, at worst an elaborate pinball machine design. Like ‘Benjamin Button,’ a script about life framed through the eyes of a director obsessed with death, “The Lovely Bones” can never settle on a tone, and we never get to see any onscreen ideas take flight due to Jackson’s insistence on constant motion and activity, with occasionally mordant horror-movie touches, leading to a climax that wants to be everything to everyone — and isn’t it funny how movies that spend the longest time in incubation always seem the least-finished? (and that melodramatic This Mortail Coil cover of Jeff Buckley’s “Song of the Siren” in the climax feels nauseating as if it’s a parody of shampoo or tampon commercial; most of the songs featured in the script made the movie).
Peter Jackson remains a director of wonderful skill and imagination, but he hasn’t been genuinely exciting for a long time. We only somewhat appreciated the impressive technical craft of “Lord of the Rings,” and were apathetic about “King Kong” but we‘re always willing to give the inventive Kiwi genius a chance. “The Lovely Bones,” however, is simply an out-and-out misfire. [D+]