Alison Rowat's Review
Hollywood is reluctant to think of any novel as being beyond its reach. What lies flat on the page, the thinking goes, can soar on the screen. Not so, sadly, in the case of The Lovely Bones.
Alice Sebold’s bestseller was the novel that defied all expectations to be a success. Peter Jackson’s picture appeared to have everything it needed to do the same, including a superb cast and a director who is as much at home in arthouse cinema (Heavenly Creatures) as the multiplex (The Lord of the Rings). It is, though, a very difficult watch.
As narrator Susie Salmon (an excellent Saoirse Ronan) confides at the beginning of the Seventies-set film, her family is not the kind to whom bad things happen for no reason. When they do, Susie remains our guide as they struggle to find peace.
Jackson’s focus on that family, led by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz as parents, and Susan Sarandon as Susie’s grandmother, works well as a tender study of grief. Before that, however, there is the matter of what happens to Susie. Though the scenes are handled with great care by Jackson, I found them acutely distressing.
Other problems arise when the picture turns to the realms of the afterlife. Jackson’s candy-coloured imaginings look like a mix between a travel ad for Switzerland and very early Terry Gilliam.
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, there’s a police investigation going on. The shifts in tone can be brutal and disconcerting. Credit to Jackson for trying, and to Stanley Tucci in earning an Oscar nomination as the neighbour from hell, but in this case the book should have been the last word.
Paul Greenwood's Review
In a project that seemed bombproof on paper, Alice Sebold’s acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones is brought to the screen by a fine cast and one of the most celebrated directors of our time, Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson.
Early hopes were for a serious Oscar contender, but it has been so royally bungled by Peter Jackson that the resulting wreckage was, at one point, in danger of not even being released.
It is 1973 and 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) has been murdered by her neighbour Mr Harvey (Stanley Tucci). She narrates from the grave as her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) try to come to terms with her death.
What should be a harrowing tragedy has been turned into a toothless and neutered disaster, entirely bereft of human emotion or connection, misguided in tone and botched in its key scenes. If you did not already know Susie had been murdered, you might not be any the wiser following the way Jackson presents it.
While it continues as a missing person mystery on earth, Susie is stuck in the ‘in between’, a sort of limbo between the living world and heaven. This is where Jackson really loses the plot, creating endless computer generated dreamscapes that, for all their quixotic beauty, offer no shred of narrative coherence and leave us clueless as to what exactly Susie needs to do to escape it.
While Wahlberg refuses to let Susie go, Weisz decides she can’t cope and runs away, which works in our favour as they never remotely convince as a couple. Tucci has ended up with the film’s only Oscar nomination but even he is unconvincing, obvious and overly mannered.
Worst of all is Susan Sarandon as grandmother who, in one of Jackson’s many blunders, is for some reason brought in to provide comic relief. This is a film about a murdered child, and yet Jackson thinks it is acceptable to keep the mood whimsical, even having the gall to give himself a Hitchcockian cameo.
How can a film with this subject matter be so inert and uninvolving? With no emotional heft you are left to ponder the point of the whole thing. Deeply underwhelming, it does not work as an exploration of grief, of the afterlife, as a story of redemption or of letting go.
It almost comes to life in the later stages, when it threatens to become a more traditional thriller when Susie’s sister begins to suspect Harvey, but after one tense scene it reverts to the lumbering mess it was before.