Directed by: Peter Jackson
Premise: An adaptation of Alice Seybold’s novel.
A teenage girl is murdered and from the afterlife she watches her family attempt
to solve the crime.
What Works: The Lovely Bones has some
notable performances by Saoirse Ronan as the teenage victim, Mark Wahlberg as
her father, and Stanley Tucci as the killer. The visual effects of the film are
equally impressive.
What Doesn’t: Despite strong performances and
some visual flair, The Lovely Bones is an incoherent mess of a film. The
story has several alternating themes such as achieving justice for the departed,
coping with loss, and redefining life after a tragedy but the film never settles
on any one theme, hopping from one to the other. The fantasy sequences, as
beautiful as they often are, do not have any point and are full of visuals that
do not mean anything. The settings and the symbols of the afterlife do not carry
weight or significance to the story and so the murdered teenager spends her time
wandering around a vestibule in the middle of a cornfield instead of doing
something that might advance the story. Her family’s story is equally
ineffective, as her father begins to investigate the murder but none of his
efforts result in anything. The Lovely Bones is also problematic in its
unwillingness to face the ugliness and pain of the violence of the teenager’s
death. All films dealing with ghosts or vengeful spirits face an inherent
contradiction; if there is indeed a life after death, as this film supposes,
then it is problematic for the ghost to proclaim that they were “killed”
because to the audience they are very much alive. The Lovely Bones exacerbates this problem because the victim is never shown suffering, her
afterlife plays like an idealistic fantasyland, and the story does not give the
living characters any goal; even if they solve the crime or come to peace with
it, that does not translate into any kind of benefit for the spirit of their
murdered daughter.
Bottom Line: The Lovely Bones is a stunning example of good actors, a good filmmaker, and high production values all being derailed by a bad script. There is just too much fundamentally wrong with this film to save it.