By Matthew Jackson
Moviegoers know Peter Jackson best as an epic director, the guy who spent millions upon millions of dollars bringing the world of J.R.R. Tolkien to the screen, and millions more reimagining “King Kong,” one of the most beloved monster flicks of all time.
What you might not know is that before he was the epic master modern audiences know, he was a maker of smaller, more intimate films, from shoestring budget zombie holocausts (“Dead Alive”) to dark and emotionally resonant dramas (“Heavenly Creatures”).
After several years attempting to bring further epics to the screen (and failing), Jackson decided to return to the land of the human drama, signing on with wife/screenwriting partner Fran Walsh and friend/screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens (both of whom worked on “Lord of the Rings”) to adapt Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel “The Lovely Bones.”
Like “Heavenly Creatures,” it’s an intimate story, but like his last two films, it also contains moments of epic imagery in the form of a dead girl’s personal afterlife. It’s a bridge between Jackson’s past and present propensities; a family drama with epic overtones.
“Bones” is the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a murdered teenage girl who observes and comments on her family’s grief and her killer’s plots from “the in-between,” a constantly shifting world between Earth and Heaven built of her own memories and feelings.
As Susie journeys beyond her earthly life, her father (Mark Wahlberg) sinks deeper into a grief-driven obsession to find her killer, her mother (Rachel Weisz) slips away from the family as her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) takes over household duties. And her killer, the reclusive George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), dreams about her murder and sets his eyes on a new victim, Susie’s sister (Rose McIver).
The film shifts between these two worlds, and sometimes lives in both at once, as Susie, still unwilling to move ahead to Paradise, reaches out to her father and her high school crush and relives her killer’s savagery, hoping for justice that seems to never come.
As he did with Tolkien, Jackson, aided by Walsh and Boyens, makes Sebold’s novel his own, eschewing much of the familial drama in favor of a thriller with supernatural overtones. The grief is there, but the meditations on it are far briefer than Jackson’s interest in the dueling minds of George Harvey and Jack Salmon.
In this respect, the thriller respect, Jackson excels, building a pace and tightrope tension that is only broken when the camera turns away to another character. Ever the visual master, Jackson’s camera, aided by an eerie Brian Eno score, is the chief instrument of suspense. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (a Jackson alum from way back) builds light and shadow in masterful ways, and distinguishes brilliantly with light the varied states of earth and the in-between.
And it is there, in Susie’s new world, that Jackson once again flexes his “epic director” muscles, crafting impossible landscapes from Susie’s mind that range from a crumbling gazebo in a dark forest to an armada of ships in bottles breaking on giant rocks. Though some of these images are predictable, and very reminiscent of other “afterlife” films, Jackson proves he’s still a force to be reckoned with in the digital effects world.
Though at times the film seems to move too quickly between characters, and the tone sometimes changes so quickly you’re left spinning in your seat, the film is anchored by a cast of immense talent. Ronan cements herself as one of our great young actresses, lending an immediate empathy to Susie Salmon that places emotional resonance in scenes where the rest of the filmmaking might have fallen short. Wahlberg finds a surprising sentimentality in his acting range that anchors the scenes of family grief. The film’s real star, though, is Tucci. Not known for playing villains, he takes George Harvey to insanely creepy levels, hitting a nerve of terror that vibrates through the entire film.
If there’s a major flaw in the flick, it’s the anti-climactic nature of it, the moment when Jackson’s thriller styling and Sebold’s emotional depth clash to form an ending that doesn’t really satisfy. “The Lovely Bones” soars for 90 minutes, but loses it in the home stretch, severely dampening the impact of what you might have been feeling when the flick started. It’s still good, but it falls short of epic.
Matt’s Call: It’s not the best thing Jackson’s done, but he could do far worse, and it’s definitely a film that will hit everyone on some level. See it with someone whose hand you can hold.
