In the idyllic American suburbs of the 1970s, young Susan (Saoirse Ronan) is lured from her walk home from school by a creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci) into a sinister cornfield dollhouse. Her disappearance shatters her family: her mother (Rachel Weisz) seeks solace in farm work, her father (Mark Wahlberg) obsessively pursues the investigation, her little brother grieves, her sister (Rose McIver) tries to stay strong, and her boozy grandmother (Susan Sarandon) attempts to hold them together. From the afterlife, Susan watches over them, unable to let go, which only intensifies the pain felt by both the living and the dead.
While it might not have kept everyone up at night, the question of what Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), was up to next was certainly intriguing. For a successful artist, a lifetime directorial carte blanche and a hefty bank account are excellent reasons to take a creative break and spend millions on a passion project: exploring the sunken Titanic like Cameron, playing with toy cars like the Wachowskis, or, like Jackson, enthusiastically bringing his childhood love for King Kong to the screen. Continuing in that vein would have been entertaining, but The Lovely Bones raises some serious questions about Jackson’s choices. Why take such a heavy-handed approach to a sentimental novel about a girl in heaven, originally published in Seventeen magazine?
A Missed Opportunity?
In the wake of the Twilight saga, The Lovely Bones feels like a belated marketing misstep by a major Hollywood studio trying to tap into new markets. The film correctly identifies the trend: two years prior, stories about love and death from a teenage perspective were skyrocketing in popularity, which is why Steven Spielberg was briefly interested in adapting Alice Sebold’s novel. However, Jackson’s overly sentimental and upbeat tone, intended to cater to teenage grandiosity, turns a promising idea into a complete embarrassment. It’s like giving a gloomy teenager, contemplating suicide over a broken heart, an expensive, well-illustrated memoir of people who have survived clinical death.
Special Effects and Genre
The film’s special effects, reminiscent of esoteric folk art sold in parks and subways, fit this description perfectly.
Perhaps this also defines its genre: the worst nightmare of Catherine Hardwicke and fans of her film would be the director of The Lord of the Rings engaging in New Age propaganda of Twilight, compared to which even the apotheosis of folk superstitions like Ghost (1990) with Patrick Swayze would seem like a true Shakespearean tragedy.