The Lovely Bones (**½)

Directed by: Peter Jackson

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, Rose McIver, Susan Sarandon, Michael Imperioli, Reece Ritchie, Carolyn Dando

Seen: February 28^th 2010

**½ Out of ****

Susie Salmon (Ronan) is a beautiful 14-year old girl with a great family living in a wonderful neighbourhood in Pennsylvania in the early 70’s. Her father, Jack (Wahlberg), is great, mentoring Susie in his hobby, building model ships in bottles, and he is madly in love with her mother, Abigail (Weisz). She has an older sister, Lindsey (McIver), and a younger brother, Buckley, who are both happy additions to the family, and her grandmother is a typical semi-alcoholic matriarch type, Lynn (Sarandon). All in all this appears to be a mostly normal family.

At school Susie is one of the normal kids, and she is in love with a boy at school, Ray Singh (Ritchie). One day at school he actually walks up to her, tells her she’s beautiful, and arranges a date with her, one that is doomed to never happen. That afternoon, on her way home, Susie is approached by George Harvey (Tucci), who tells her he has something to show her. It happens to be an underground lair he built, claiming that it is a place for a kids’ club, but when Susie tries to leave, Harvey rapes and murders her, and successfully hides her body.

When she doesn’t make it home in time her parents start worrying (as parents naturally do), and Jack goes looking for Susie. Susie is running around on the same streets her dad is busy searching, and she screams when she sees him, only to have the world fade to gray around her, and she realises she’s a ghost, now living in some sort of purgatory, as Buckley calls it: the in-between. This is a magical world where everything is beautiful, and Susie sees things that only happen in dreams. This is also a world where Susie can, just like the movie, conveniently forget what happened to her, apart from it simply being a murder, that is. The underlying sense of discomfort in the movie seems to be kept on the back-burner so that no-one ever really needs to deal with it, no urgency is ever given to the actual terrible nature of what happened to Susie – none except for her father’s need to capture the actual killer.

The movie starts off with a sense of beauty that only existed in earlier times, when the world still celebrated beauty, instead dictating it in beauty magazines and on catwalks everywhere. It also tries to stay on that trajectory in big part, which is difficult for a story of this nature. The actors are all very impressive, Saoirse Ronan all innocence as Susie, Mark Wahlberg very good as the gentle and loving father, with Susan Sarandon stealing the show as the drunken matriarch. Rachel Weisz is sparsely used as the grieving mother and could have made more of an impact on the story if used more – she is a great actress. Stanley Tucci is excellently creepy as the perverted killer hiding in plain sight.

The Lovely Bones has great visual impact and some elements of innocent love that are touching, but I felt somehow removed from the characters by the use of special effects and the way the story gets told. There is poetic justice in the ending, but not truly quite in the way you’d like. The Lovely Bones is Peter Jackson’s lowest profile feature length for quite some time after The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong, and it seems that his adeptness with massive presentation has removed him slightly from the emotional impact a movie can have… The Lovely Bones is just another movie then, with some great special effects, but not much more.