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Peter Jackson tries to make the morbid tale of a 14-year old girl’s murder into something other than a depressing drama. The result?

The Players: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, and Rachel Weisz

The Director: Peter Jackson

The Gist:

Based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones stars Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon (yes, like the fish). In the film’s first ten minutes, Susie appears to be destined for a long life of romance, happiness, and photography when she runs into her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, on her way home from school. The crafty Mr. Harvey (played by Stanley Tucci) lures Susie into a clubhouse he built underneath a cornfield, where he eventually rapes and murders poor Susie.  The remaining 120 minutes is devoted to the aftermath, which comprises mostly of the Salmon family sleuthing out suspects with the help of Detective Len Fenerman (played by Michael Imperioli) and failing to recuperate. All the while, though, Susie is watching over the Salmons as well as her killer from the comfort of a digital wonderland between heaven and Earth called the “in-between.” She struggles to balance her urge for revenge with her desire for her suffering family to let go.

The Judgment:

Director Peter Jackson seems to have been chosen to direct The Lovely Bones due to his innate capability of creating visually stunning new worlds, as he showed us in The Lord of the Rings series and in the modernization of King Kong. Here, Jackson tries his best to weave the real world and Susie’s CGI-laden afterlife into a coherent, emotionally driving picture. Unfortunately, the way this movie inorganically switches back and forth from the aftermath on planet Earth to Susie’s experience in the in-between makes for an unstable tone and, as a result, a very incoherent film.

Now, this is not to say there isn’t anything good in The Lovely Bones. It is very well acted and photographed. Ronan gives an eerily solid performance and Mark Wahlberg is also strong as the grieving father, but Stanley Tucci deserves a great deal of acclamation for his performance as the creepy, pedophyllic, mass-murdering neighbor. Just a close-up of Mr. Harvey’s hauntingly shifty blue eyes gives you an idea of how excellent Tucci is at embodying this dollhouse-building, well-quaffed, serial-killing fiend. Don’t be surprised if this is the year Tucci gets his first Oscar nomination. Also noteworthy is the work of cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, who provides us with a detailed array of crisp and richly colorful shots that contribute very nicely to the plot’s progression.

However, despite these refreshments, The Lovely Bones could not be salvaged from the misdirection of Peter Jackson. To me, the film was annoyingly divided. On one side, you have the story of the Salmons trying to recover while the killer next-door tries to keep a low profile. This is, despite its sadness, an interesting and captivating tale. And when the Salmons eventually begin to suspect Mr. Harvey, the movie becomes even more suspenseful and even more captivating. Then, of course, there’s the other half of the movie featuring the in-between and a skilled staff of special effects artists. Jackson tries to make this place a paradise for young Susie by incorporating numerous aspects of her life into the in-between, which would have been fine.

But whenever things were getting interesting back on Earth, the movie abruptly went back to the in-between and Susie’s internal conflict. For example, when Susie’s younger sister secretly investigates Mr. Harvey, I was captivated by the suspense and became very interested in the film. But in the midst of this very tense moment, we are immediately forced back into the in-between. I was frustrated. I wanted to go back to the interesting story, but I had to sit through another obligatory adventure through Peter Jackson’s digital funhouse.

And speaking of which, another big problem with The Lovely Bones is the in-between itself. Yes, we know that it’s the last stop until heaven and it’s filled with lots of components in the life Susie left behind on Earth. But, in the movie, there appear to be rules in the in-between enforced by another victim of Mr. Harvey: a small Asian girl named Holly played by Nikki SooHoo.

This keeper of the law vaguely mentions a few of these laws that later play a big part in the plot, which makes things even more bewildering than they already were in the in-between. At the point where I knew in-betweenian law would come into play, I was incredibly confused as to what allowed what was happening to happen. Also, Holly, our tour guide of the afterlife, has a strange tendency of slinking into the shot out of nowhere whenever Susie was watching the latest happenings down below. I felt like I was watching The Grudge and Holly was the ghoulish albino feline monster thing that jumped into scenes out of nowhere and scared people. Yikes!

One other major issue I had was the screenwriters’ inability to find a solid tone. The script penned by Oscar winners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens has areas of suspense, comedy, and emotional drama that only make the movie even more divided than it already is. So, because the tone was so uneven, I was rendered unable to care deeply about most of the characters. The exception to this was Mr. Harvey, but only because of how chillingly superb Stanley Tucci’s performance was. How sad is that? The only truly interesting character in a movie about the killing of a fourteen-year old girl is the guy who killed her!

Catch It, Rent It, or Skip It:

Had the execution not been so unbelievably disjointed, The Lovely Bones could have been one of the year’s best films. But, alas, Peter Jackson’s vision and the oft-wavering tone of the script hold it back from any such glory; which makes this film well worth skipping.