Fifteen years after Peter Jackson’s international breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures (1994), New Zealand’s virtuoso of the digital spectacular rekindles his passion for fantastical landscapes and the charred innocence of pubescent girls with The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Sebold.
Steadily attaining a foothold in Hollywood’s upper echelon since Creatures, Jackson has reached the film industry’s twin zeniths: he owns multiple slots among the highest-grossing films along with multiple Academy statues. Appropriately, his aesthetic has assumed the grandiosity befitting his status alongside the Spielbergs and the Camerons. Like the former, Jackson has an itch to intersperse small, “personal” projects between his slate of Megabudget Romps, but, like the latter, he’s also developed, stylistically speaking, a crippling sense of magnitude. During The Lovely Bones, an intimate portrait of a family ravaged by tragedy is pancaked under the weight of PJ’s operatic style and broadly swathed dramatic instincts. Jackson is clearly a superior storyteller to Cameron, and his King Kong remake beats the hell out of Spielberg’s most recent stabs at spectacle, but he’s lost the ability to fly low and maneuver his lumbering style into coexistence with delicate scenarios. An auteur in the truest sense, his voice irrevocably booms across, over and through his films, producing an inhospitable environment for anything save Event Films and Summer Tentpoles. This development is all well and good – and is more likely than not to leave audiences satisfied -- so long as he learns to avoid material such as Sebold’s novel.
The Lovely Bones, as we’re told in breathy voice over by Susie (played with appropriate gracelessness by Saoirse Ronan), tells the story of how the Salmons family processes their eldest daughter’s unsolved murder. The film is split in half dramatically: one section is set in a kind of sun-drenched purgatory in which Susie frolics with other murder victims and contemplates the division between life and death, while the remainder takes place in a dreary suburb where her family threatens to unravel after her killing. Mark Wahlberg – enjoyable, but straining credibility as a middle-aged, middle-class Daddy -- plays the relentless father who refuses to let his daughter’s killer go unpunished. A forgettable Rachel Weisz is Susie’s flaky mother and Susan Sarandon cameos as the alcoholic grandmother, though both never quite find suitable niches within the film. A subplot involving a romance between Susie’s former crush and a clairvoyant farmer’s daughter never really pays off or generates much friction.
The lone dramatic idea that Jackson and his screenwriters can muster is that the living and the dead must relinquish one another if they’re to find happiness. Daddy and co. must move on and enjoy what’s left of their own lives, while Susie must refrain from meddling if she is to acclimate herself to the world beyond. Most troubling about the film is the way in which happiness after death, a somewhat absurd notion crafted here from pure kitsch, is defined. We spend a good deal of time lolling about Susie’s eternity as she agonizes over what’s become of her family. It is an afterlife of luscious pastures, gazebos and lighthouses, the culmination of which (once the departed have learned not to fret the dealings of the living) is a blindingly white meadow for Susie and her newfound gal pals to trample through. Pretty uninspiring stuff, and it all looks like a botched collaboration dreamed up by Thomas Kincaid and Lisa Frank. One has to wonder if this is Jackson’s ideal resting place for the deceased, or if he’s merely burrowing his way into the metaphysical fantasies of suburban teenagers. The film doesn’t ultimately say, thus frustrating viewers who attempt to orient themselves within the filmmaker’s jumbled formulations.
Also tragic is the way in which the geography of real tension, the domestic turmoil of the fanatically devoted father and the evading mother, is abandoned in favor of Susie’s paradise of digital de-lites. A born storyteller, Jackson occasionally scares up real juice as the Salmons clan struggles to keep themselves intact while the neighbor who murdered their daughter (the terrifyingly mundane Stanley Tucci) contemplates his next victim. The opportunities are squandered, however, as Jackson is more concerned with exhibiting celestial reflecting pools and swooping camera movements that would both feel more innocuous in Middle Earth or Skull Island. The quintessential Jackson shot – the camera arcing in a hovering sweep over the landscape, resembling the POV of a plummeting hang-glider – is disjunctive in this context. It’s simply too bombastic for the material.
Those familiar with Jackson’s upchuck classics Meet the Feebles (1989) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead, 1992) might chortle at hearing descriptors like “subdued” or “unassuming” applied to them, but as excessive as each is in terms of content, there is a much looser, modest quality to their aesthetic and execution than what’s on display in the histrionic The Lovely Bones (1). Jackson’s ascendant style since Feebles has little retrospective character. His formerly delicate execution is no longer tenable due to his (well-deserved) stature as the Modern Spectacular’s greatest talent. From the standpoint of the horror convention crowd, it’s a lamentable forfeit. But, in this case, the Midnight Movie’s loss is the Multiplex Blockbuster’s gain.
Beyond Tucci’s marvelously unsettling performance, The Lovely Bones’ chief source of satisfaction is its rough, ambling structure. Gone is the carefully etched dramatic triangle of Jackson’s recent films, which navigate rather single-mindedly toward massive, conclusive battles. Though laden with clumsy foreshadowing and banal metaphors -- both visual and literal – The Lovely Bones is refreshing and intriguing during the moments when the story refrains from announcing its intentions so directly, thereby allowing for anticlimaxes and diversions that offer something close to satisfying viewing. Nestled within a glut of ham-fisted dialogue and cheesecake effects, these could be considered the film’s more novelistic qualities (2). Still, as with the rest of the film, these virtues are swallowed by Jackson’s thunderous vision.
The Lovely Bones / USA, UK, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 122 min. / Directed by Peter Jackson / Written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens / Based on the novel by Alice Sebold / Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon / Wingnut Films, DreamWorks SKG
Notes:
1 – The former is a backstage drama set in a bizarro Sesame Street populated by degenerate muppets; the latter is an inverse Night of the Living Dead, wherein the hero must keep his zombie mother from escaping their home. Though anarchically comic in tone, it may be the bloodiest film ever made, which, depending on one’s point-of-view, may be Jackson’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker.
2 – I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the source novel, though have heard from trusted sources that the most glaring divergence between the film and the book is in the depiction of the crime: in the former Susie is murdered in a bloodless sequence, while in the book she is brutally raped and butchered. Make what you will of Jackson’s refusal to shoot such a sequence.
