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CibbuanoThe Lovely Bones
January 14th 2010 07:51
Peter Jackson was pelted into the director's A-list thanks to his colossal success in bringing the Lord of the Rings movies to the screen. He followed this with a remake of King Kong, a spectacle-based adventure that suffered from serious length and pacing issues. I wouldn't exactly call King Kong a flop, but I think it's safe to say that it more than whetted the public's curiosity when it came to what Jackson was capable of as a director. And so, some four years later, Jackson makes a rather quiet reappearance with a flashy adaptation of the much-loved novel The Lovely Bones, just in time for the 2009/2010 Academy Awards, and no one really seems to care. It will be interesting to see if The Lovely Bones even gets nominated for anything come Oscar-time as the film seems like a rather tasteless non-event.
For those not familiar with the book, The Lovely Bones tells the disturbing story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, fresh from her Oscar-nominated turn in Atonement), a 14 year old girl who meets a rather gruesome fate at the hands of a child-molesting serial killer (played by Stanley Tucci) in the 1970s. Susie narrates this story through flashback, starting with her hopeful days of adolescence and then bringing us up to speed with her time in the place between heaven and earth - an ectoplasmic place of beautiful symbolism where she is able to watch her family deal with the fallout of her mysterious death.
It's not a bad movie, and it's not a boring movie, but there's something about it that just doesn't feel right. I haven't read the novel so I can't really comment on a comparison between the two, but I have faith in the Jackson team's peerless ability to adapt a source material to film in the best possible way. I mean, you don't just fart out The Lord of the Rings in a fit of self-indulgence - anyone able to bring those books to film in such an entertaining and thematically-faithful fashion has to know what they're doing. There's a lot of recommend The Lovely Bones... the film itself is shot in orange and light grey colour tones, calling to mind a vivid 1970s polaroid, and the introduction of the killer's death lair in all it's glory is a wonderfully grim sequence - the camera actually sinks into the ground alongside Susie and her fear is absolutely palpable. The sound design is also brilliant too... Susie's feet crunch across decaying leaves as she's led to her doom, intercut with the crockery clanking onto her family's table back at home, a table she's noticeably absent from. Susan Sarandon is also great as the groovy, drunken, inappropriate 1970s grandma and if anyone is likely to get nominated for this movie it's probably her for the Supporting Actress category.
What doesn't work in this movie is the meshing of the 'heaven' sequences and the real life events back on Earth. Jackson invests a lot of visual detail into this fantasy world, one amazing scene involves giant glass bottle boats wrecking themselves on rocky cliffs around an ocean, but ultimately this world feels too underdeveloped in terms of Susie's narrative. Most of the time I just wanted these sequences to not exist so we could follow the plight of Susie's family in a more indepth fashion. I know this would be at odds with the book, but Jackson' preference for these fantasy sequences doesn't really sit well with the film's serious subject matter. Maybe he's even aware of this, as he also sanitizes the rape aspect of Susie's death - no mention is made of this aspect whatsoever, even when the opportunity arises to bring it to light. There's a slight implication that Tucci's character gets up to this sort of thing but it's largely suggested to be just a case of murder, which stinks of the kind of bowdlerisation I thought Peter Jackson would be above (seeing as he started out with a fine line in graphic low-budget horror films). Then again, we all know the trouble it takes to get R-rated films nominated for Oscars.
The way I see it, this film is about the malformed healing process that follows in the wake of a highly traumatic crime. I guess this aspect of the movie was more than adequately explored, and in this respect I can even accept the ongoing presence of Susie after her death. I just think Jackson should've addressed the nature of Susie's death a bit more and reigned himself in a bit when it came to the afterlife sections of the movie. I understand that he's primarily interested in fantasy-stories (only really one film in his back catalogue, the thematically similar and infinitely superior Heavenly Creatures, can really qualify as a story that could take pace in the real world) but maybe he shouldn't be attempting material like this if the non-fantasy sequences aren't interesting enough for him. Sadly, I suspect that his choosing of this material was more about chasing critical acclaim than it is about telling a great story in the Peter Jackson way.
LOWPOINT: Towards the end of the movie a godawful Celine Dionesque song plays over part of the climax. Not only is it hugely unneccessary and comes from out of nowhere, it also feels at odds with the film's atmosphere, style and setting. What were they thinking?
HIGHLIGHT: Jackson seems to be using some kind of high-definition microcamera for some small parts of certain scenes. I've not really seen shots like these in any other movie so I'm assuming he may have had some hand in pioneering their use for film. Anyway, these shots often take place in scenes involving Stanley Tucci's creepy character and are actually quite unnerving.
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