The Lovely Bones
Director – Peter Jackson
Starring – Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon
MPAA - Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving disturbing violent content and images, and some language.
The Lovely Bones is Peter Jackson’s foray into the non-epic film genre. Instead of portraying epic battles and giant monsters, we get kind of a murder mystery thriller that blends the artistic green screen aspects of “The Fountain” and “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” with films of high tension and mystery like “Frequency” and “Changeling”. The wild imagination of Peter Jackson heavily influences this film, but the major bugs are not all Jackson’s fault. We can also blame is screenwriters, the same ones who collaborated on his past 4 epics.
What could have been a great film mixing the thrills of a murder mystery with the drama in a victim’s surviving household, instead became a film tripping out on an acid-high version of heaven combined with an overreaching message teaching us that a first kiss is so important that even if a person dies, he or she can’t go to heaven until that person processes the body of another to get that first kiss. Screw catching your killer, forget reassuring your grieving family, NO, possess your old boyfriend’s new girl friend, and get your dang first kiss, then you can move on!
The first three quarters of the movie are fairly well put together. Aside from the weird “in between place” that out lead character is stuck in while her family grieves for her murder, the plot is pretty interesting, well thought out and gripping. I wanted to go into the film and just cut out the dead narrator and focus on the family, and Stanley Tucci’s brilliant villain character.
The unassuming Stanley Tucci performs in a role so different from his charming Paul Child in “Julia and Julia”, it is hard to tell it is the same actor. No wonder he got an Oscar nomination for the movie. In fact his performance was one of the only redeeming qualities in the film. Had it been just the living people in the movie without a dead girl running around a Tim Burton-esque heaven landscape trying to let go of life so her family could move on it would have been a pretty good film. And throwing in Stanley Tucci’s performance of the creepy neighborhood serial killer the movie might have bordered on brilliant.
What we got instead was a movie that was half interesting, half a psychotic drug trip, and complete with the worst last 20 minutes ever. In fact the ending is so horrible it makes the whole film unwatchable. I am sure there are a few Peter Jackson film-lovers who sat through this garbage ending loving each slow motion second… They probably also liked the fact that this film had more endings than “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”, though we are spared from the 3 hours of tedium.
The plot starts us off with the happy Salmon family fathered by the soft spoken Mark Wahlberg and mothered by Rachel Weisz. The fashionable grandmother is Susan Sarandon, who is also a hoot in this film, as much fun to watch as Stanley Tucci, but obviously not as creepy, is a heavy influence on the little starlet who narrates. The 14 year-old Susie Salmon (a pretty decent acting job by Saorise Ronan) is killed by Stanley Tucci, who plays the kind, gentle, almost un-noticed, unmarried, neighborhood recluse, and she goes to a place between life and death where she has to learn how to let go of life and move on while running across landscapes more bizarre than Dr. Parnassuses Imaginarium, but a little more tame than Tim Burton’s Wonderland.
Instead of solely dealing with the finding and catching of Stanley Tucci’s character the film also deals with the concept for letting go and moving on after a traumatic death. We see the unique though not all that interesting perspective of a the murdered girl and her struggle to accept her death and move on while simultaneously seeing her parent’s struggles to cope with the death of their oldest child. The in between world of Susie’s and ours is somehow connected through the actions of the killer, the victim, and the victim’s family. It is an interesting idea, but mostly serves to confuse the audience, muddle the ideas of an afterlife, and let Peter Jackson show us all he knows how to use a green screen too.
In short “The Lovely Bones” forces the audience to sit through an artsy take on life and death and then leaves everyone in a disappointed rage with the worst endings ever. I will give this film a 5 out of 10 because it was not a terrible film as far as film making goes, but it is a frustrating and weird piece that is ultimately unsatisfying and mostly a waste of time.
Sex/Nudity – 4 out of 10 – A husband and wife passionately kiss on a bed, we assume they have sex. A teen boy and girl kiss. A teen couple go into a corn field and we assume they are engaged in sexual activities. A teen girl is blamed for arousing a boy because of her nude drawing, we see the naked woman sketched in pencil. We see a man naked in a bath tub, the camera is looking straight down, but the water is murky and hides his mid section, we see bare legs and a bare chest.
Violence/Gore – 6 out of 10 - A man is badly beaten with a flashlight and baseball bat. We see some blood and multiple bruises. A man imprisons a teen girl she kicks him in the face as she struggles to get free. He throws her to the ground. Later we see him in a bath tub, there is mud and blood on the sink and tile floor. We see the corpses of a man’s murder victims. A man falls from a cliff and we see his body hit many different rocks, we hear crunching sounds as he hits.
Profanity – 4 out of 10 – Kids In Mind says the is 1 “F” word, but I don't remember it at all... there were only maybe 6 other exclamations, including one or two religious obscenities.
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