Photo Gallery
The film begins with just about that much subtlety. There's a voiceover narration about a daughter's memory of a penguin inside a snow globe which upset her, since it seemed trapped. But then her father tries to perk her up, saying the penguin's perfectly happy, 'he's trapped in a perfect world.' Consider that theme underlined.
Susie Salmon (the great Saoirse Ronan) is the girl providing the narration. It all comes from beyond the grave, as not far into the film we witness her murder at the age of fourteen - the result of mistakenly following a neighbor, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who grinningly promised to show her something neat. It was 1973, a time, Susie notes with questionable historical accuracy, 'when people believed things like that didn't happen.' Afterwards, Susie resides in some kind of fantasy screensaver pre-heaven afterlife, watching her family disintegrate in the aftermath of her disappearance. Her killer remains on the loose, coolly watching the neighborhood from his humble little house just down the street from the Salmons, reliving the murder in contemplative solitude and revving himself up for the next bloodletting.
Susie can only watch, mostly powerless but for the occasional ability to haunt, as she flits about her heaven, a frankly beautiful universe of painterly effects and iconic vistas that recall the impressionist living museum-world of What Dreams May Come. She watches her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) turn into an obsessed avenger, bothering the detective (Michael Imperioli) on the case with thinly-sourced theories and clues about who Susie's killer might have been. Meanwhile, her mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) starts to crack under the depressive pressure and the beautiful foreign classmate (Reece Ritchie) Susie had her eyes on appears to finally find interest in another girl. Life goes on.
In securing Ronan for his Susie, Jackson both scored a coup and also created an instant vulnerability for the film. With her sharp, searching eyes, and that will-o'-the-wisp intensity she used so devastatingly in Atonement, Ronan takes over the film whenever she is on screen. The gap that her character's death leaves is a difficult one to fill, though Jackson definitely tries, by hurling in a gin-soaked grandmother (a thoroughly game Susan Sarandon, having a ball with the caked makeup and dangerously dangling cigarette ash) and a modicum of the-killer-among-us drama familiar to watchers of prime-time police procedurals and tabloid news shows. (Disappointingly, one entire sequence in which the killer is being questioned by the police, while showing off his miniature doll-house, seems ripped straight from a C.S.I. episode.) While the years go on, and Susie tries to decide whether to finally head straight toward the bright light, the film loses much of its rhythm.
The Alice Sebold book club-mainstay that Jackson adapted The Lovely Bones from is reportedly the kind of thing that leaves readers exhausted afterward from emotional overload. But as commanding as Jackson's assembled cast is - Tucci being a particular standout, giving this comb-over murderer an unsettling sense of lethargic menace - he can never muster up a powerful enough empathy to elicit the right kind of gut-level response to its tragic tale. The film remains critically bifurcated between its real and fantasy worlds, with Jackson's uncertain pacing and tone (further hampered by a few particularly bad music cues) hurting the first, and his hyperactively fantastical special effects keeping the latter from attaining any sense of solidity. Ronan's Susie is the only real linkage here. While the performances of Ronan, Tucci, and some others make The Lovely Bones a film worth seeing, they can't make it a film that cannot be missed.
