Movie Review: The Lovely Bones

LITTLE ROCK — While it is not the disaster that some have described, The Lovely Bones is an odd and sometimes dispiriting movie that lurches wildly between wishful fantasy and gritty crime procedural. It is not recommended to those who loved Alice Sebold’s 2002 best-seller of the same title, for they are likely to perceive something perverse and self-aggrandizing in the changes to the story and the characters occasioned by the screen adaptation.

Peter Jackson and his usual screenwriting collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have simplified and amplified Sebold’s text, turning it from a meditation on the interiorpolitics of family into a supernatural revenge story. While there are a lot of things Jackson does right - chief among them the perfect casting of the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan in the central role of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in 1973 - the movie seems to miss the point of the novel.

While Ronan is entirely watchable, with an alert, intelligent and rapt face capable of conveying comprehension and confusion in the same look, Jackson thrusts her through his movie like a petulant child playing with an embattled rag doll. Susie isn’t merely abused and murdered by the creepy suburbanite George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who makes doll houses for a living, but by the creepy director who constructs for her a risible vision of heaven’s waiting room, a sunny vulgar space where whims are literalized. In the novel it’s funny - and obviously generated by the dreams of an early adolescent. On-screen, it’s more obviously the pixel work of Jackson’s extraordinary Weta Digital cohorts.

A movie of jarring juxtapositions - there are a couple of broad comic scenes seemingly imported from some banal family comedy - and odd choices (Tucci is given a blond comb-over and porn ’stache), The Lovely Bones is partially redeemed by a remarkably tense scene in which a clueless police detective (Michael Imperioli) unknowingly stalks the perp through the scaled windows and doors of one of his custom dollhouses.

Jackson chooses to emphasize Harvey and his Silence of the Lambslike preparations for his crime, shift-ing the balance of the film from the left-behind family to the still-extant threat. It doesn’t help that Tucci plays the guy as the standard-issue quiet neighbor who tends to his lawn (and rosebushes). He quivers and tics, telegraphing kink and self-loathing beneath the neutral windbreaker.

As the dead girl’s parents, Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz fare only a little better, as the script requires them to, respectively, drill down into obsessive madness and take a powder. Both are fine in thosestill moments when they are not required to do the sort of ridiculous things people tend to do in (or because of) movies.

Still, in the end, there is a weird, nagging hook to the film; a strange combination of professionalism and quirk. Jackson has blended horror and pathos before to fine effect - his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures could have been an audition for this job. But while it’s not a complete botch, and an audience divorced from the source material might receive the movie differently, The Lovely Bones feels inert and superfluous, a tone deaf interpretation of someone else’s song.