Fittingly, for a movie about a life held at a single point while change flows past it, Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones takes you back to 1994's Heavenly Creatures, the breakout feature from the New Zealand filmmaker and the first sustained indication that his feel for an adolescent viewpoint could result in a singular vision. Separated by the vast enterprise that was The Lord of the Rings trilogy, not to mention the King Kong remake, the two films feel twinned, linked through time like the very protagonists of this new story.
In Heavenly Creatures two schoolgirls plot the murder of an adult, while The Lovely Bones sees an adult plots the murder of a schoolgirl. Both movies saw adolescence as a time of melodrama, both wondered about the secret lives of the young. They both also use digital effects to suggest the fantastic and otherworldly, although it's fair to say that the Weta production house has come a long way in 15 years. The question is: has Peter Jackson?
The Lovely Bones was adapted from Alice Sebold's 2002 novel by the now distinguished trio of Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and they've used their experience and understanding to both streamline it and shape it towards Jackson's concerns. On one hand they've made the plot more of a thriller, with a tension growing out of the murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) by a neighbour from down the street, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), that is carried into the final scenes.
But what they've excised is the moral complexity. After Susie's brutal murder, as she exists in the purgatory that is "in the blue horizon between heaven and earth", her family struggles to deal with the unsolved crime. The focus is her father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), who grows steadily more obsessive about finding his daughter's body and her killer. But less attention is paid to his wife, Abigail (Rachel Weisz), who can't live with his zeal. In the book she eventually falls into an affair with the investigating police officer, Len Fenerman, but in the movie, played by Michael Imperioli, he's but a dutiful investigator. Abigail simply leaves, instead of opening the way for an investigation of grief's savage, sometimes cruel, needs.
Jackson, perhaps, has made too many tales of childhood wonder. He sees the film through Susie's eyes alone. Stanley Tucci gives a lugubrious, sometimes clichéd, performance as the everyday murderer lurking in a neatly manicured house. He has wispy hair, a lurking bulkiness and his voice slightly cracks with evident pleasure when he lures Susie into his trap. Tucci is an old hand at this; watch how Harvey's mouth is always slightly open but his teeth are never seen, leaving a black void.
Jackson's instincts take him towards the afterlife Susie moves through and it matches the character of a naïve, hopeful teenager who was just about to go on her first date with a boy. Her spiritual halfway house, curiously enough, bears resemblance at some points to James Cameron's Pandora, his vision of the fantastic from Avatar. At one point Jack smashes his collection of model ships in bottles as Susie stands on a shoreline, watching giant bottle break open and the ships sink – it's effective, but limited. Jackson can do the eerie and the striking, but he can’t genuinely draw spiritual strength from the material.
As shown by Atonement and Death Defying Acts, Saoirse Ronan, with her piercing gaze, is a technically gifted child actor, but I don't think that even she can pull off the riskier gambits of the storyline, such as Susie's brief return to Earth in another girl's body. It doesn’t help that from the first line of voiceover there is a weighty tone to her every pronouncement; a playfulness might have expanded the mood's parameters. As it is Susan Sarandon, channeling Endora from Bewitched, supplies the light relief as Abigail's boozy, chain-smoking mother, who becomes a ramshackle matriarch.
The Lovely Bones is plainly capable, but it falls the wrong way at key moments. Expansive and florid when it should pay heed to minimalism, squared away when it needs a flourish. It is satisfying as a mystery, but the broader aims take flight in an ungainly way. Peter Jackson remains in the thrall of the fantasy realms. It's not as far from Middle Earth to suburban Philadelphia as you might think.
