.
January 27, 2010
Shelmi Liang
Alice Seabold’s beloved novel, The Lovely Bones, has been made into a profound movie by Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old girl, has been unexpectedly murdered. As her family suffers the loss and hopes to find her killer (Stanley Tucci), Susie looks on from the afterlife. She can’t move on to heaven, so she is stuck in between heaven and earth, influencing the living world whenever she can.
The film tackles tough subjects, but elegant, smooth filmmaking keeps us comfortable when we know bad things are about to happen. The supernatural visuals are remarkable. The first images of the afterlife are just slightly off: empty and fuzzy, with a voice-over echo. As the afterlife develops, it becomes surreal but not abstract. It is all stuff we know but just put together in unnatural ways; for example, scenes feature an underwater house, fields undulating like ocean waves and giant ships in bottles. The graphics and the character development in this film are similar to Jackson’s previous film, “Heavenly Creatures.” Like “Heavenly Creatures,” “The Lovely Bones” has the spiritual world called the “In Between.”
Susie’s signs to the living are beautiful. In the real world, Jackson constructs simple visuals. The killer’s face is just out of frame while he makes all the preparations in a suspenseful montage. It is interesting to see the characters eye each other through the windows of a dollhouse during the murder investigation. Focus on the giant fingers turning pages of a scrapbook offers an unusual perspective on reality. It allows even the simplest actions to have powerful meaning.
Tucci performs his role extremely well. With the creepiest comb over, viewers easily buy into his sweet pretense. We know that he is the one that is going to murder her, but when he is shown as a lonely old man, our curiosity leads us to be sympathetic towards him.
The story is about grieving on both sides. The living has to find a way to cope with the most horrible tragedy imaginable. Susie, too, has to find a way to let go of her earthly contacts. It is an intense spiritual quest and an insightful look at human coping. Yet it is never grim.
Some parts of the book were either changed or eliminated. In the book, Susie is raped and murdered. There is no distasteful rape scene in the film. It is only implied in the film. As for the other omissions—so what?
This film is enough to create the impact the story deserves. Since it works so well in this format, maybe the book did not need all those extra scenes.
Verdict: B+
