There have been many films made about the afterlife, but few have given it such little thought as Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, adapted from Alice Sebold's bestselling novel. I haven't read the book, but I would hope that it is braver and more imaginative than Mr. Jackson's film, which is cold and unsympathetic. Its story of a murdered young girl's journey through purgatory is maddeningly simplistic: not as dumbfounding, mind you, as What Dreams May Come, but close. It looks upon its characters the way an audient at the Republican debates might react to Rick Perry's execution track record: this world doesn't matter, the next is more important, and let God do the sorting out.
I think the first wrong step was commissioning Jackson to direct the film. At first glance he would seem like the ideal choice, as his Heavenly Creatures told a similarly brutal story mixed with elements of fantasy. But that was a painfully honest picture, set in brutal reality rather than the magical world of flowers that The Lovely Bones occupies. His The Frighteners dealt passingly with the concepts of heaven and hell and the mess in between, but only so far as the ghost story needed.
Not that Jackson need be a true believer to direct a movie about heaven. Clint Eastwood, not the most devout believer, was able to pose some honest and interesting questions in his afterlife-themed film, Hereafter. Though that too was a failure, it was an intelligent and ambitious one. The Lovely Bones is only interested in the subject as far as it can manipulate the audience.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, from Atonement) is a normal 14-year-old girl in an idyllic Pennsylvania suburb. She likes her family, likes taking pictures, and has a crush on a local boy who might just like her back. Then one day, she never comes home.
Susie finds herself in a purgatory-like state, somewhere between earth and the Great Beyond, where she can see what happens on earth and affect it in strange ways that are never quite made clear. Like many movie ghosts, she can't come right out and talk to her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, from better movies), but she seems to affect their moods and send messages through the ether that they can somehow receive.
The movie's earthbound sub-plot is actually quite well-played, and so much more interesting than anything it has to say about metaphysics that we wish the movie had just ditched the whole heaven thing and been a story about a family coping with losing a daughter. Wahlberg and Weisz are very good, as are Susan Sarandon as Susie's alcoholic grandmother and Rose McIver as her suspicious sister.
As the killer, Stanley Tucci easily ambles away with the film. Not content to be a stereotypical movie psycho, he takes an approach similar to The Vanishing: he plays a believable sociopath who kills simply because he can. It's in his scenes that Jackson is most comfortable, and builds suspense quite nicely in one breaking-and-entering sequence, as well as a conversation with a police officer (Michael Imperioli, also very good) that lovingly rips off Shadow of a Doubt.
Though Ronan is very good, she's stuck in the movie's more preposterous storyline. The movie ends up being a victim of its own premise; since there's no real way for Susie to affect what happens on earth in a major way, the two plots remain awkwardly separated. All that connects them is a ridiculous theme of a kind of simple divine providence in which everything happens for a reason and everything is worked out after death. (The way that the Tucci character meets his end is particularly insulting to the intelligence of any thinking person.)
I don't know if the widely praised novel is as shallow as this film or not. Perhaps it isn't, and Jackson has simply misread it. I have a feeling that the book was more about the need for an afterlife than about the actual afterlife. Imagine if the movie were told not from the point of view of the dead girl, but rather from the point of view of her younger sister, who needs to create this image of her sister in heaven in order to cope with her loss. If Jackson had realized that the more captivating story was on earth rather than in heaven, The Lovely Bones would not seem so silly, pretentious, and insulting.
** out of ****
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