The Lovely Bones

If ever a subtle bone existed in the body of Peter Jackson, it has now been ground to dust under the weight of his heavy-handed direction. For evidence of this creative collapse, viewers need look no further than his gooey adaptation of Alice Sebold's touching novel The Lovely Bones. Despite a strong cast, promising source material, and the potential for breathtaking visuals, Jackson's latest movie is a misguided mess.

On the surface, the story is ripe with unique possibilities. Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is an average teenager living in a Pennsylvania suburb in 1973 with her Mom (Rachel Weisz), Dad (Mark Wahlberg), sister Lindsey (Rose McIver), and brother Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale). Her life is governed by a budding interest in a boy at school and a passion for photography.

Life is pretty normal, until the fateful night that Susie is lured into an underground hideout by a creepy neighbour named George (Stanley Tucci), who promptly murders her in unseen fashion. At this point, the plot splits into two specific pieces, each of which bear expansive dramatic potential. One plotline chronicles Susie's afterlife experiences in a celestial waiting room that acts as a final step before entering the gates of Heaven. The other plotline is concerned with the grieving family's quest for truth.

The paralleling plotlines promise a powerful look at life and death existing in hopeful harmony, but Jackson has no desire to let the movie's themes simmer and grow. He wants to get to the point and he wants to do so in hurried fashion. Somewhere along the way, Jackson has transformed into a walking contradiction. He is an impatient storyteller whose self-indulgent desires lead him to stretch out every moment and every scene to ensure a lengthy running time. And when all else fails, there's always a pile of weepy sequences waiting to be supremely sentimentalized through the use of slow motion.

Jackson's direction is so ham-fisted that it might as well be baked with honey and dressed with glazed pineapple rings prior to punching us in the face. Somebody could sleep through this movie and still pick up on everything Jackson is force-feeding us. He goes straight for the obvious in every scene, never skipping an opportunity to show Susie screaming in fear and frustration or George glaring creepily in the dark. It is here that a healthy dose of subtlety is most necessary.

Jackson seems to have lost all faith in the intelligence and attention span of his audience, a woeful mistake that leads to multiple scenes of extreme repetition. At one point, while George is being visited at his home by the detectives investigating Susie's murder, the comically moustachioed villain spots a bracelet that belonged to Susie now placed on a nearby table. The detectives approach the location of the potential evidence, but George manages to slyly conceal the bracelet just in time.

This scene is supposed to offer something that resembles suspense, so Jackson cuts to close-ups of the object about a half-dozen times, constantly reminding us of the bracelet's location and of George's attempts to hide it from the police. The scene is predictable from the start, but Jackson's directorial decisions make it ridiculous. Whatever happened to trusting the viewers to follow the story and digest the information on their own?

Jackson seems to be providing a lesson in caveman filmmaking, constantly clubbing us over the head as he awkwardly struggles to make his point. To be fair, frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens deserve some of the blame for this fiasco, since they share the screenplay credit with Jackson. Much of the script is very faithful to Sebold's book, but I feel that what is lost in translation is mainly discarded by Jackson's treacle-infused direction.

Then again, let's pile some more of that blame on the seemingly promising cast. Ronan appears uncomfortable in her role and not in a convincingly adolescent way. Her occasional voice-over narration sounds false and emotionally disconnected. Wahlberg and Weisz also deliver similarly flat performances. They aren't necessarily awful, but rather entirely dull. They appear to be simply going through the motions without any sense of where their supposed character arcs plan to take them.

McIver musters up a commendable amount of dramatic energy as a young woman slowly surpassing her deceased sister in age and maturity. She is actually allowed to show more than one emotion and she at least appears to be trying, which is somewhat worthy of mild applause, considering she is surrounded by a cast of lazy performers. Susan Sarandon shows up as a boozing grandmother, as well, and she manages to have fun with her role, if only because she's playing the lone character who gets to let loose and act drunk the entire time.

But the most shameful performance of the bunch is delivered by the usually trustworthy Stanley Tucci, whose antagonist is so ludicrously over-the-top that he never achieves a single moment of believable villainy. With his bushy moustache, oversized wire-rimmed glasses, greasy hair, and disgusting leer, this guy looks like he's been shopping at Pedophiles R Us for the last decade. He's now perfected the stereotypical look of a creepy neighbour planning to prey on innocent children and Tucci's performance only serves to push the character to a place of parody.

The Lovely Bones marks a very strange misstep for Peter Jackson. I happen to adore most of his work, from the gleefully grotesque B-movies that marked his debut, such as Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, to his brilliantly brutal depiction of shattered innocence in Heavenly Creatures, to his acclaimed adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. But his work in his latest feature is so unforgivably inane that I fear where he is headed next.

Perhaps Jackson has exhausted his current bag of tricks and he needs time to enter a new phase of his directorial career. There are moments in The Lovely Bones where Susie's afterlife world conjures some intriguing visuals and the attention to period detail back on Earth is a reminder of Jackson's potential as a dedicated storyteller. But these positive attributes are needles in a decaying haystack, barely visible when considered alongside the towering failure that is this movie.

On top of every baffling creative decision that I have already covered, Jackson even resorts to a pile of montage sequences to ensure that his movie be viewed as a silly comedy instead of a heartstring-tugging drama. There's the "Susie's Dad lists every man in the neighbourhood as a suspect, except for the guilty guy" montage, the "Grandma loves to drink, ruin laundry, and fall asleep with lit cigarettes" montage, and (my personal favourite) the "Heaven is a 1970s rock album cover" montage. If there's any lesson to be learned from these, it's that bad filmmaking should be mocked.

Clocking in at 135 minutes, The Lovely Bones is far too much of a bad thing. Peter Jackson holds our hand for the entire duration of the movie and he lays the sap on thick. It is impossible to ignore his manipulative efforts and the movie suffers from his overbearing style right from the beginning. The dramatic potential never surfaces and this tale of a family torn apart and the little girl watching from above never finds its emotional footing. In the wake of this hokey hiccup of a movie lies a collection of lost opportunities, strewn about in carelessly random order. Jackson refuses to loosen his grip on the narrative and he soon chokes all the life out of these supposedly Lovely Bones. The finished product would be depressing if it weren't so laughably shallow.