The Lovely Bones is a 2009 film directed by Peter Jackson, starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Michael Imperioli, Susan Sarandon, Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver.
Much like the novel it’s based on, the film The Lovely Bones has brief flashes of brilliance weighed down by heavy handed visualisation and schmaltzy emotion that rings so false it’s almost painful to watch.
There’s a flash of this brilliance early on where the detective investigating the disappearance of fourteen year old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) shows her parents a piece of evidence, the knitted woollen hat her mother made for her that she was wearing the day she went missing. There is a beautifully subtle piece of acting between the detective played by Michael Imperioli and Susie’s mother, played by Rachel Weisz. Her mother takes one look at the hat and knows her daughter is dead. Her father (Mark Wahberg) clings desperately to the hopeful notion that she is just missing. He feebly tries suggesting that finding a hat doesn’t mean the same thing as finding a body. I love the look the mother and the detective exchange. The two actors convey the extreme emotions without dialogue, and Rachel Weisz does it perfectly. She knows, and he knows that she knows. The dialogue that follows (he tells them they also found a ‘significant amount’ of blood) is for her father’s benefit – the detective knows he doesn’t need to say anything else to Susie’s mother.
The Lovely Bones is far from a terrible film. It's just not a very good one. It was produced by DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s company, and directed by Peter Jackson. Now, the novel swings pretty wide of being great literature, but I can’t help but feel that had Spielberg not got his corny paws on it, and in the hands of a more courageous director, the film would have been much better. Jackson just doesn’t give the subject matter (the brutal murder of a teenage girl and her family’s subsequent grief) the gravity or respect it deserves.
Firstly, Jackson shies away from depicting the more brutal aspects of Susie’s rape and murder as in the novel in favour of focusing more on her ascent into heaven and subsequent observations of her grieving family from there. The problem with this is he spends way too much time on fancy CGI visual crap rather than character development or story, so in the end the film ends up being strangely shallow and superficial. The novel is an examination of grief and loss, the film is way too much of the cool visual stuff from What Dreams May Come with very little of the emotional resonance that made that film great.
Astonishingly, as visually adept as Jackson is, in this film he seems to fail at the most rudimentary visual stuff. There’s a scene where the detective and the killer exchange a few glances through the tiny windows of a dollhouse the murderer has made. The scene is trying to be some kind of creepy, Hitchcock-esque cat and mouse thing between the cop and the killer, but the way it’s done, not to mention the looks the actors give each other, make it come across as almost comical.
Anyway, the character that suffers the most from Jackson’s inability to delve beyond the surface is Susie’s mother. In the novel she becomes distanced from her family because, as much as she loves them, they are also a daily reminder of the daughter she’s lost. She even has an affair with the investigating detective, not out of lust, but rather a desperate need to escape her sense of loss. Susie’s father is a reminder of her murdered eldest daughter. The detective represents a world beyond that pain. It’s a wonderfully moving and tender examination of just how immensely complicated grief can be. But in the film Jackson shows this is in the most inane way possible – he has her literally leave. Her departure halfway through the film dreadfully short-changes her character. It’s like Jackson and Co couldn’t figure out how to write her, so they just decided to have her run away instead. In presumably trying not to depict her as cold and unsympathetic by omitting the affair, they make her seem that way anyway. She goes off to find herself and come to terms to with things by picking grapes in a vineyard in California. As a plot device this is not awful, but the way she re-enters the film later does make it seem like all she needed to get over her little girl’s murder was a break and some sunshine.
I understand to a point the reasons Jackson and his writing team (wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) had for excluding the more difficult aspects of the novel. Showing Susie’s rape and murder in all its terrible detail would have come across as gratuitous. What makes the rape so horrifying in the novel is that her murderer stuffs her knitted hat into her mouth to shut her up. The hat has a jingle bell on it, so she is forced to lie there being viciously assaulted listening to the jingle bell going as he’s raping her. It’s truly abhorrent, but probably would have been very hard to film without glorifying the moment. And having her mother indulge in an affair with the detective would have made her seem callous and turned the audience against her. The thing is though, on both counts, I don’t think this works.
Take the scene depicting Susie’s murder. It’s well-filmed, generally, I mean the lead up to it is wonderfully done. We the audience know the situation is creepy as fuck (a middle-aged guy coaxes a 14 year old girl into his underground ‘clubhouse’), but it takes Susie a while to realise that something is not right, and by the time she does it’s far too late. But the climax of the scene is terrible, it’s PG-13 run of the mill thriller movie nonsense: Susie desperately leaps for the ladder to escape but, set to a sinister music cue, her murderer grabs her – cut to black. Don’t get me wrong, it’s suspenseful, but it’s not nearly as horrifying as it should be. We’re seeing an innocent little girl about to be raped and strangled, this is not Jason Voorhees waving a machete and chasing a scantily-clad blonde through the woods.
The characters are a really mixed bag but thankfully the performances are mostly really good. Saoirse Ronan is terrific as Susie. She shows a great deal of emotional restraint for an actor so young. Stanley Tucci as her murderer is also quite good though he’s depicted as a stereotypical creep so his performance never goes anywhere unexpected. We get dimly-lit shots of him creepily sitting in his car or playing with his dollhouses but again, it’s really nothing we haven’t seen before. Rachel Weisz and Michael Imperioli (a vastly underrated and underused actor) are both good in what are essentially bit parts. Unfortunately this is balanced by the woeful performances of Susan Sarandon and Mark Wahlberg.
Sarandon plays a drunk, one of those supposedly wise older ladies who swills bourbon while dishing out nuggets of sage advice. It’s painful to watch. When will filmmakers learn that the wise old drunkard is not funny? She’s supposed to be a bit of comic-relief, which would work better if the rest of the film was as dark as Jackson is pretending it is. Sarandon’s character (the grandmother) coming to stay is the biggest WTF moment for me in the whole film. As the pill-popping drunk who breezes in and supposedly stirs the family out their reverie, brings happiness into the dark household, yadda yadda, Sarandon is mostly just obnoxious. But again, this is all shit that has been done many times, it’s superficial and it’s lazy writing.
Mark Wahlberg is fine when playing thugs, and is actually quite talented when it comes to comedy. But when he plays a character any deeper than a wading pool he fails miserably, and this film is no exception. He’s about as emotive as a wall of sheetrock. In the mercifully infrequent scenes where he has to play opposite the talented Rachel Weisz you realise how one-dimensional he is.
I think I would be far less critical of the film had I not read the novel first and seen how vastly better it deals with the subjects and issues it presents. The book is waffling and pretentious, but it is a solid examination of a family’s grief and loss and certain parts are incredibly well-written and intensely moving. Jackson could have presented the difficult stuff with respect while still making a hard-hitting film that could have been just as moving. Instead he slapped on the CGI visuals with a paint roller rather than a fine brush and treated the emotions like he was too afraid to delve any deeper than the surface and the result is a film that is technically flawless yet distant and cold.
It may seem an odd comparison, but The Lovely Bones suffers from what I call Phantom Menace-syndrome – that is, an over-reliance on flashy CGI to tell a story rather than trusting your script and your actors to deliver a film that will have an impact regardless of its visuals. There’s a truly beautiful scene in The Lovely Bones where Susie’s father places a candle in the window of his study for her. One night, as he’s looking at it, the reflection of the candle in the glass doesn’t match the flame he sees before him, and he’s convinced that it is Susie communicating with him. This wonderfully subtle use of CGI to convey a powerful emotion is what makes the scene so incredible. It’s a crying shame the whole film wasn’t nearly as good.
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