Peter Jackson swings and misses – ‘The Lovely Bones’ Review

Posted on January 23, 2010 - 2:00pm by michael Peter Jackson has one of the most interesting career arcs of any major director that I can think of. He began his career in film making with a couple of horrifically gory horror films, Bad Taste, which lives up to its name, and Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive), one of the most preposterously gory splatterfests I’ve ever seen, and I know my way around the video store. Sample dialogue: “Your mother ate my dog!” Nice, right? So Jackson goes from making this stuff to directing one of the biggest and best trilogies ever committed to film, and then follows it up with a big-budget remake of King Kong, one of his own childhood favorites. Many times the question has been asked, Where does he go from here? As I might have done myself, he chose to leave the big budget special effects extravaganzas and do something a little more down to earth, like the story of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and her subsequent adventures trapped in limbo while her friends and family grieve and attempt to move on. I can tell that Jackson wanted to do something a little smaller, something that he thought had a genuine story that he really believed in, but unfortunately he chose to challenge himself in a genre that he doesn’t know, and he ended up getting wrestled to the ground and then pinned under an avalanche of cheesiness. And as far as the made-for-tv special effects, I’m not even going to attempt a theory. The story – A 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon is raped and murdered and then finds herself in a strange afterlife populated by other girls whose lives were interrupted, and who now provide helpful advice about such things as the post-mortem rules against interacting with the still living, and so forth. Almost a year passes. The town grieves and her family is understandably devastated. Her father Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) struggles to accept her loss and then becomes dangerously obsessed with conducting his own investigation into the murder of his daughter. Meanwhile, his increasingly ignored wife Abigail (Rachel Weisz) nurses a growing need for professional help and then ultimately abandons her husband and their remaining children in favor of a life picking fruit in some field outside Santa Rosa. Nice. Meanwhile, Susie’s killer (a thoroughly seedy Stanley Tucci) goes on with his lonely life across the street from the Salmons, the town moves on and begins to forget, and as Susie watches from a parallel dimension, it becomes less and less likely that he will ever be brought to justice. And then things get weird. Jack becomes obsessed with his own investigation, driving his friend in the police force up the wall with his constant requests to look at this guy’s or that guy’s background, tax information, phone records, etc. He suspects the 80-year-old man across the street of bizarre sexual behavior because he discovered that he wears adult diapers. Ah, I see. Surely he’s the killer then. Never mind the creepy, lonely guy across the street with the doll-house collection. He’s cool. But the big problem is that the film has an unfortunately disjointed feel as it swings wildly back and forth between deeply inspired direction and screen composition to cheeseball effects sequences (although I should mention that yesterday I watched Avatar in 3D, so it’s to be expected that the effects might look a little unimpressive) and far too much breathy narration by Saoirse Ronan. She’s a fine actress, especially for a 15 or 16-year-old, she was brilliant in Atonement and is otherwise impressive here as well, but her cloying narration makes the movie sound like a bad self-help video. Mark Wahlberg falters a bit during his obsessive investigating but otherwise fits his role nicely, as does Rachel Weisz as his wife. I would be lying if I said that the effects sequences were not occasionally beautiful, but in the same way that a photography student’s Photoshop work can be beautiful. The colors and composition are nice, but looking at them, it’s impossible not to think of the effects guys sitting in darkened rooms pasting images together and making wild adjustments to the colors and contrasts. Surely I’m not the only one who has come to expect more than this from the man who brought Middle Earth to life. The story encapsulates an interesting idea but Jackson doesn’t know when to rein in his artistic flagrancies, resulting in a touching tale of loss and suffering punctuated with weird flights of artistic fancy that call attention to their strangeness more than they add to the story. Sad to think that it may very well only have required a little less of that for the movie to have been much, much better. The Bean Meter