Review by Luke Gorham: The announcement that production had begun on Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” was initially one of the more exciting movie-related news items of the last few years. Following his massively popular "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and his blockbuster "King Kong" remake, "The Lovely Bones" was supposed to be Jackson’s intimate, understated return to the domestic drama of his early career triumph, "Heavenly Creatures." Unfortunately, "The Lovely Bones" is, in some ways, just as bombastic as any of the aforementioned box-office giants. Based on the bestseller of the same name by Alice Sebold, the movie's overreaching verbosity turns the would-be slow-burn drama into an indulgent fantasy with fatally excessive special effects.

Jackson's movie centers on Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl who's brutally murdered by a pedophile and must help her family solve her murder from beyond the grave. But Sebold's original novel is more concerned with the dissolution of Susie’s family following her death, focusing heavily on her obsessed father (Mark Wahlberg), her traumatized mother (Rachel Weisz) and her embittered younger sister (Rose Mclver). Jackson’s version puts the spotlight on Susie trapped in her colorful "In-between," and her scheming murderer, leaving the book’s more interesting characters frustratingly underdeveloped. Wahlberg is given little to do but snivel and brood with a look of surprise permanently planted on his face, while Weisz, playing perhaps the book’s most complex character, is rendered laughably vacuous in her approximate ten minutes of screen time.

Jackson hopes the special effects that animate Susie's in-between world are the real draw. And, admittedly, several sequences in "The Lovely Bones" achieve a visceral bliss, beautifying Susie’s dreamscape in evocative ways and mirroring the unfinished conflict that lingers from her past life. Jackson, more than most working directors, understands the enduring beauty invested in tragedy, and he aptly demonstrates this in one mesmerizing sequence, wherein Susie's father smashes his treasured ship-in-a-bottle collection, an act that devastatingly reverberates in the in-between as a manifestation of his grief and rage. Another striking (and creepy) visual motif involves a dollhouse, evincing Jackson’s strength as a suggestive visual craftsman. But for every element of visual ingenuity and beauty Jackson brings to this adaptation, he loses much more of the novel's powerful humanity.

What Jackson seems to lack is a filter—or a different perspective that might've forced him to wrestle with the effects of Susie’s tragedy in the real world rather than just a fabricated one. His actors fare a little better: Ronan and Stanley Tucci deliver solid, if not outstanding performances, the former fulfilling the promise of her prior Oscar nomination and Tucci morphing into a truly terrifying villain (though not much of a developed one). On the other hand, Wahlberg and Weisz’s characters could have facilitated a memorable study of marital grieving—like, say, those of Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek in Todd Field's “In the Bedroom”—but Jackson is far too committed to his role as Technical Wizard to see what actually makes Sebold's story so magical. In short, Jackson gets all of the hard things right in "The Lovely Bones," and all the easy things wrong.

Last Word: Jackson's special effects wizardry is as spectacular as ever, but he overuses that side of his talents here. His miscalculation, and his misunderstanding of the real magic in Sebold's bestselling book, leaves “The Lovely Bones” adrift between mediocre fantasy and mishandled drama.

Review By:
Luke Gorham

IN REVIEW ONLINE