After watching this film, I found its title more accurate than one might think —’lovely’ applying to the fleetingly lush beauty of this new production, and ‘bones’ being a grisly apt word for death and destruction, not easy viewing for 10am on a Monday morning.
The film, based on the internationally best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, follows the life, death, and afterlife of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year old girl whose murder sends shockwaves through a small Pennsylvania town. Susie narrates from her front-row seat in heaven, trying to guide her shattered, grieving family to her neighbor and murderer, the eerie Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci). The ripple effect of her mysterious disappearance and horrific murder extends to Susie beyond her brief life, and she is stuck in the ‘in-between’ world until she can see that justice is served.
Ronan, whose dramatic whispering and gasping earned her an Oscar nod for best supporting actress in Atonement, falls flat here. Her dreamily sighed narrations sound cloying and forced—and, God help me, almost over-dramatic in a story about rape and murder. Tucci, however, plays an excellent sinister villain, planning out the murder of his next victim in his khakis and the safe cocoon of unassuming American suburbia. Sarandon is also predictably excellent, as Susie’s brassy grandmother, who wears too much eyeliner and says everything she is not supposed to.
This is undeniably a Peter Jackson production—the man definitely loves his lengthy epics. He does an excellent job with the suspenseful parts of the film, creating a few heart-pounding scenes that, at times, I could barely view through my fingers. Though the real-life element can be captivating, it is the imagined reality of the otherworld that didn’t seem to appeal. Jackson imagines the ‘in-between’ as a lurid Technicolor fantasyland; I sometimes half-expected Frodo’s curly mop of hair to emerge from the sweeping mountain landscapes of limbo. But it is Jackson’s interpretations of the more gruesome parts of the novel that are the most disturbing. Where Sebold succeeded in the novel was in the grace and dignity she allowed to even the most horrific of moments—here, Jackson’s overly vivid interpretations wallow in the muck and gore. Watching Tucci haul Susie’s body around in a burlap sack was physically sickening, made all the worse by the accentuation of sound as he drags it across his basement floor and hurls it into a rusting iron vault.
This movie wasn’t overly bad, and I’d even go so far to say that it was engrossing and touching at times. But it is doomed from the start as an adaptation of a novel that combines so many genres of fantasy, crime, romance, and melodrama. It lacks the beauty and grace of Sebold’s work, leaving this film as just a pile of bare bones that are far from lovely.
3 stars
