Film of the week: The Lovely Bones (12A)

Damon Smith • Published 3 Mar 2010 14:00 0 Comments

HERE is life after death in Peter Jackson's visually stunning interpretation of the best-seller by Alice Sebold, which proves to be one adaptation too far for the Oscar-winning director of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and King Kong.

Cutting back and forth between the real world and a colour-saturated heavenly limbo, The Lovely Bones details the efforts of a murdered 14-year-old schoolgirl who helps her grieving father apprehend her killer from beyond the grave.

In doing so, the girl's tortured spirit can attain lasting peace, along with the murderer's other victims.

Jackson's screenplay, co-written with wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is caught in its own limbo, unable to bridge the narrative divide between the corporeal and ethereal planes where the story unfolds.

A miasma of computer-generated special effects in the otherworldly sections, courtesy of the digital wizards at WETA, is distracting and we yearn for a speedy return to the drabness of reality.

Fantasy is vastly over-rated.

On her way home from school in early December 1973, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is lured to her death by neighbour George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who dismembers the girl and hides her remains in a cast iron safe in his basement.

Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) and his colleagues never find Susie, just her woollen hat in a cornfield and traces of the girl's blood.

The teenager's father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) and booze-soaked grandmother Lynn (Susan Sarandon) are denied the chance to bury the child.

Jack sacrifices his marriage to embark on a tireless campaign to track down his daughter's killer, but there is no evidence, and the police grow tired of his theories.

Classmate Ruth Conners (Carolyn Dando) is touched by Susie's spirit and could perhaps provide that vital link between life and death.

Meanwhile, George watches the Salmons closely from his home across the street, fixating on Susie's sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver).

"Mr Harvey began to feel a familiar itch," confides the murdered teenager in voiceover. "It had been a long time now..."

The Lovely Bones is hamstrung by Wahlberg's inability to convey a single genuine emotion. He wrings crocodile tears in vain, and tries to make us care about his patriarch's quest for vengeance.

Ironically, the dead have far more life, especially Ronan who delivers Sebold's words in heart-tugging voiceover: "I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, as you will one day be, forever safe... but it's not quite like that."

On terra firma, we latch onto McIver, who breaks into George's house to seek clues just as he returns home in the film's nerve-shredding, standout sequence.

We are equally mesmerised by Tucci, who inhabits his role completely, and feel a chill down the back of our spines every time his soulless eyes bore into the camera.

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This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 25 Feb 10

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