Peter Jackson’s first drama since his mighty Heavenly Creatures (1994) was one of 2009’s biggest disappointments. Perhaps it was disastrous as both an adaptation of a beloved novel and as award-garnering cinema. I still came away with an impression of inherent personality and nobility of effort on Jackson’s part, as well as astounded by his near total failure to make it cohere. It’s very much a Jackson film, and not simply a by-rote transcription of a beloved book by a competent hack. The resulting clash of authorial voices is a source of both much that makes the film worth watching, and also what’s finally, cruelly calamitous about it. Jackson’s familiar, volatile sense of life and death and the boundaries between, and the over-eager joy in cinema as an expressive tool, are present throughout. The Lovely Bones is an outlandish potpourri. It's a The Virgin Suicides-esque fall-from-Eden reminiscence in the ‘70s suburbs. It's a Touched by an Angel-level, therapeutic mystical drama. It's an eerie psycho-thriller. It's a realistic portrait of an everyday nightmare. It's a suspenseful horror movie. It’s occasionally striking, even gripping, and just as often inept and embarrassing. Oddly enough, The Lovely Bones strikes me as resembling The Frighteners more than Heavenly Creatures amidst Jackson's oeuvre, as heaven and hell becoming porous, and the primal screams of justice-seeking Furies resound.
The story depicts 14-year-old Susie Salmon’s rape and murder by a neighbour, and her subsequent attempts to negotiate her way towards the self-extinction of nirvana after passing through an intermediate, fantastical paradise, where she lingers to aid her grief-stricken parents, siblings, and potential boyfriend in coping with her end and track down her killer. Such material required a felicity of touch, a lightness of vision, such as Cocteau or William Dieterle (in Portrait of Jenny) once mustered, to keep such contrasting elements in accord. The starting point, the annihilation of a promising young life in the midst of the flurry of awakenings that define adolescence, is actually better achieved here than in dozens of other films that revolve around such brutalisation, because Susie (Saoirse Ronan) is fully introduced as a living, breathing, giddily energetic being, and not merely in the canned way that, say, Sean Penn’s daughter in Mystic River is portrayed shortly before a sticky end (She danced on a bar top! O, cruel fate!), but with all the messy energy and nuance of a full protagonist, with her enthusiasm for photography and her mad crush on surprisingly responsive, improbably dashing Anglo-Indian student Ray Singh (Reese Ritchie).
Ignoring personal opinions about the nature of life, death, metaphysics, and justice for a moment, and trying to take it as given in the material, I can say that The Lovely Bones tries to depict two concurrent urges: the need for a sense of security and righteous dominance over destructiveness, practically embodied by Harvey, and the need to accept death as a part of life, and to not die in the midst of life through grief and horror, as embodied by Susie herself and her best wishes for her family. These innately contradictory aspects of existence animate a tremendous amount of contemporary personal and social debate, and it’s not too hard to see then why Alice Sebold’s novel touched a nerve. The efforts of Susie’s father Jack (Mark Wahlberg, surprisingly affecting) to dig out her murderer, becomes a roadblock on the way to deeper fulfilment both for him and the remains of his family, and Susie herself.
In this fashion, the more humdrum side of this tale – the process of worldly retribution that is the obsessive theme of so many of the more generic dramas we watch and read these days – is placed into direct contrast and conflict with a more elevated, far less common type of spiritual narrative. Nor is the film concerned with arguments for and against vigilante justice as a panacea against the existential ache of tragic loss, a la Mystic River or In The Bedroom, two films similar in their starting points. Instead, it is an attempt to tease apart these two urges, one an attempt to assert control over capricious fate, the other invoking acceptance of that capriciousness, and look at them in distinction. They do dovetail in crucial moments like when Jack, venturing out into the night to chase down what he thinks is the killer, instead has his bones broken by a zealous boyfriend who thinks he’s an aggressor himself.
That scene, like many others, is hampered in impact by the over-busy, tonally incompatible fragmentation of Jackson Jackson
These scenes following the pivotal crime, though well-handled, define however a deeply problematic lack in the film: Susie is disconnected from her own death, only vaguely remembered, so the impact of horrendous violence is nullified in favour of a vision of the afterlife that resembles an ad for Photoshop. Such a divorcement might be considered merciful, but it also looks and feels mightily like a cop-out in conjuring a Jacobean tale of slaughter, vengeance, and spiritual reckoning. The touchy-feely side of the material, and the urgent flavour of the serial killer yarn within it, aren’t just poorly reconciled, they’re barely part of the same film. Jackson’s decision to try and paint the metaphysical side of the matter in his most showy CGI terms, reminiscent of the fantasias that punctuated Heavenly Creatures, was much mocked, but to be fair, his efforts to realise what might be a young ‘70s girl’s idyll represent a stab at a kind of wondrous humour, and a deliberate, pop-art naiveté, an ethereal formless world where huge rubber balls rise out of the sea and you can be your own fashion-plate hippie-chick hero. Unfortunately, witty flourishes are lost amongst a whole array of simplistic, conceptually limited commercial-ready digital junk. I suspect, if this aspect of the story was to have been filmed at all, then either a kind of naturalistic, artifice-free kind of landscape should have been adopted, or else an extremely, deliberately pasteboard unreality, rather than an ooh-ah evocation of what daytime television addicts imagine heaven to be like.
The conceits of the story are actually, oddly familiar from many works of pre-modern drama – say, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or Guan Hanqing’s Snow in Mid-Summer – in which the dead victim of earthly injustice looks on as the machinations of fate work and bring about balance, and perhaps lends a ghostly hint of a helping hand. What’s more discernibly contemporary is the fuzzy-headed, aspecific imagery of the afterlife and grief counsellor’s idea of resolution. The detailing of the processes of dealing with inconceivable loss and shattering of stable, warm family lives, offers some effectively otherworldly moments, like Jack lighting a candle over one of the bottled ships that are his family’s icon of generational love and using it to slightly pierce the veil between the living and dead. But when Susie’s mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) frays and finally abandons her home for a time to work as a fruit picker, her own mother, the brassy, boozy Lynn (Susan Sarandon) moving in to take her place with energetic incompetence, the movie sinks into the worst kind of pop-movie shorthand.
It’s no surprise that The Lovely Bones works far better as a killer-on-the-loose flick than as a family tragedy or moral legend. Jackson ’s at home with the sweaty obsessiveness, the lingering sense of bottomless morbid fetishism, the sick paraphernalia of a predator’s art, which forms Harvey
That Jackson is obviously more at home with the darkness of the murder yarn than the transcendent parable might be held against him, but I don’t think the beatifying hemisphere of the tale was ever going to make good cinema in any event. The Lovely Bones needed, ironically, to be colder, more reticent, and far less pretty to offer a genuine sense of the ache and terror, to make a counterbalancing sense of natural order and wonder be even slightly convincing. An elaborate sequence towards the end sees Ray’s new girlfriend, Ruth (Carolyn Dando) a mediumistic goth girl who perceived Susie’s spirit just after her death, possessed by Susie long enough for an amazed Ray to kiss her farewell, just as Harvey manages to rid himself of Susie’s body before fleeing ahead of the police, is well-constructed, and yet oddly pointless, and adds yet another, ill-at-ease element of yet another, different kind of ghost story. The whole project gives the impression of springing from an unreconciled conjoining of festering trauma and pseudo-spiritual sludge. Nonetheless, it’s littered with moments and qualities that are hard to dismiss, and the acting is generally fine. Whilst it is definitely a debacle, it’s a curiously forthright one, in the sense that it’s clearly the product of an inventive filmmaker who wants to make a work of integrity, but whose efforts are finally against the grain.
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