The Lovely Bones

Bones are not usually considered lovely, except maybe by orthopedists and dinosaur hunters. But there are certainly times when we humans know something deep in our bones, things that escape the notice of our squishier, chattier hearts, brains and guts. Director Peter Jackson’s new film, The Lovely Bones, gets inside the marrow of life, the stuff spawning all the other stuff, the hard-wired love and fear.

The film is based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel of the same name. It’s about Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl who is murdered by her creepy-yet-plausibly -respectable-serial-killer-neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), and the impact this crime has on her family and friends. The movie is set in the relative innocence of 1970’s suburban Pennsylvania, a time before children’s pictures began to appear on milk cartons and tabloid journalism met cable TV.

The celebrated director of King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy has added muscle and verve to Sebold’s meditative story, and horror. Jackson is at the top of his game when he’s channeling his inner Stephen King, luring us into darker realms of human experience, and this is quite the opposite of Sebold’s transcendent book. It’s still a powerful story but this marriage of such opposite sensibilities and styles seems destined to disappoint fans of both the director and the author.

Still, there are many memorable, disturbing scenes in this film. When Harvey is about to kill Susie, the action cuts to the young girl running silently through the inside of what looks like her family’s home. But there’s no trace of anyone there now, it’s an archeological ruin, everything stained and faded under a haze of milky white, the graffiti of eternity. The artful special effects here muffle the impact of Susie’s death, one of the reasons the film is rated PG-13 rather than R. Like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Susie stays in the movie and helps to make things work out as much as anyone can from behind the looking glass, as much as people’s lives can work out after a senseless murder.

Susie’s dad, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg), once a thoroughly amiable CPA, slowly goes rogue after his daughter’s death, stalking every man he suspects of killing his daughter. Abigail, Susie’s attentive mom (Rachel Weisz), gradually disappears from herself and then everyone else. But while Susie’s parents are falling apart, her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) begins to blossom, out now from under her big sister’s shadow. Life goes on, even if we don’t want it to, just as it stops even if we don’t want it to, and the film does a good job of choreographing the unpredictable steps of this dance.

Even in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, I think it’s fair to say that Peter Jackson is still the King Kong of lyrical special effects, Matisse to Jimmy’s Picasso. In one of Bones most graphic scenes, Harvey is shown in his bathtub some time after the murder, so still, the lighting so cold, he might be dead. We cut to blood on a porcelain sink, an image sharp enough to be a police forensic photo but lurid and painterly. The camera lingers like a butterfly, silent and unconcerned, then flits over a muddy pair of shoes, a knife, a darkly stained shirt, the vocabulary of the unspeakable.

At the other end of the emotional scale, there’s Susie in a kind of a pre-heaven staging area where she pops up periodically. In Sebold’s book pre-heaven is the Zen version of Albert Brook’s Defending Your Life, a place where Susie learns to evolve past the concerns and interests of her life, all life, the thousand unnatural shocks we are all heir to. In Jackson’s film, pre-heaven is a depicted as a kind of mobile wafting above a Flower Child’s crib, a continuous loop of cuddly and coo.

Some may welcome the succor this sweetness provides as antidote to murder most foul. But, even for talented people like Jackson, sometimes less is not only more, it’s what saves an otherwise powerful movie from seeming silly.

Saoirse Ronan, who looks like the girl on the cover of the Blind Faith album, is appealing as Susie but seems superficial, no Scarlet Johansson in Horse Whisperer she. Of course it’s possible that she was exceptionally at good conveying the teen as tabula rasa, a life eternally budded and unblossomed. I hope she gets another feature role where she doesn’t have to compete with so many special effects.