A '70s LUNCHBOX DREAM OF LOST INNOCENCE: a review of "The Lovely Bones"

“THE LOVELY BONES” Co-Written and Directed by Peter Jackson
***1/2 (three and a half stars)

This review comes to you with the slightest of trepidation. Yet I do have a question for you. Have you ever seen a movie, read a book or heard a song and your reaction to it was the complete opposite of the majority’s opinion? Think hard, because I really mean the complete opposite. Let me quickly recount to you a story from my past of a film I have seen that I had that very reaction to. I’ll try to be brief about it as I have detailed that experience within an original short story I wrote years ago and I do not wish to digress too grandly. It is a film I am absolutely certain that I am the only one to have ever appreciated it. The film is question is “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” released in the summer of 1978 and starring Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees. It has long been regarded as one of the worst films ever made yet when I saw it, at the age of 9, I responded to it in the most loving way. I adored that film and became quite obsessed with it. I cannot explain why or how but that presentation appealed to me in an inexplicable way. It reached me and possibly no one else and aside from family and perhaps two friends, no one really knew how much I loved that movie for fear I would be exiled from humanity. As an adult, I have seen it again many times and I can truly understand all of the criticisms hurled its way…and yet, I still have a fondness for it, despite some sequences that verge on being despairingly awful.

I have had what could possibly be a similar reaction to Writer/Director Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones,” a strangely evocative adaptation of the Alice Seabold novel. I must say that something odd has occurred between the time Jackson announced that he would film this project and the release. The announcement came with a wave of excitement for Jackson as he had previously helmed the highly received “Heavenly Creatures,” from 1994, which told the true story of two murderous teenage girls. It seemed that after making the Middle Earth fantasias of “The Lord Of The Rings” plus a three hour passion project epic that was his “King Kong” remake, “The Lovely Bones” seemed to be the perfect “small” project for Jackson to sink his teeth into. Then, the reviews started coming out and their near violent reaction (especially from NPR and Roger Ebert) has made the consensus strongly debate whether Jackson was ever the right director for this adaptation. I’ll address those concerns a bit later but I have to say that while it is an odd film containing tones and sequences that really should not work together, I was indeed very moved and found myself going with its unique and singular flow very easily.

The enchanting Saoirse Ronan stars as Susie Salmon (“Like the fish,” she says to us) in a story set in Pennsylvania 1973 yet narrated from her place in the hereafter. Susie is a picture of innocence and wonderment living in an idyllic suburban town, the kind of which I am not certain even exists in quite the same way anymore. She has two siblings, loving parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz), a boozy, free-spirit Grandmother (Susan Sarandon) plus a newfound hobby of photography and healthy crushes on both David Cassidy plus a very real high school dreamboat from England (nicely played by Reece Richie). Susie is the embodiment of purity and pre-pubescence, with her gangly arms and legs and undeveloped figure which is attached to her naïve worldview—which, the film seems to be arguing is a virtue and a right of childhood. One day, one her way home from school, she makes the tragic error of trusting the company of George Harvey (an effectively unnerving Stanley Tucci), the peculiar man who lives alone in the green house across the street from her family. Unbeknownst to Susie, Mr. Harvey is a serial rapist and murderer and she is the next on his lengthy list of victims.

After her death, Susie is lost within the “in-between” as she watches the goings-on of her family, disintegrating from grief and mourning, as well as Mr. Harvey, from the vantage point of an unearthly gazebo. From here, Susie has the choice to either have her soul move onwards towards Heaven or to remain watching over her family and subsequently not allowing any of them to heal and move onwards themselves.

The first hour of the film captured me instantly as it depicted a 1970s that exists as a beauteous hazy glow within my memory, as that decade held my formative years and it is a time I am forever linked with emotionally. As Susie explained, it was a time where children’s faces hadn’t appeared on milk cartons yet. There was an innocence to the depiction that I know just does not exist in the same way in the 21st century and it indeed took me back. (I concede that perhaps it is not a realistic interpretation of the period but somehow, it worked for me and I responded positively to it.)

By the time Susie makes her fateful meeting with Mr. Harvey, the film immediately turns appropriately grim and squeamish. Weisz and especially Wahlberg, who gives one of his strongest performances, very well play the reactions of parental loss. And then, the part of the film that has seemingly lost most people that have viewed it arrives: Jackson’s visualization of the “in between,” which has jokingly been referred to as looking like a Claritin advertisement—a criticism that does hold some truth but I also found it to be quite haunting and melancholy. There are celestial vistas abound with shifting seasons, leaves collectively whooshing away from solitary trees plus a creepy lighthouse containing a dark door leading to…oh well, you’d just have to see it for yourselves.

As I have previously stated, I was honestly swept up in the film’s rhythms and although there is this outcry against the movie I do not agree with, I think I understand it. I think it is a fair debate to have about whether Peter Jackson was the right director for this material as his artistic choices have been brutally ravaged for possessing a certain softness and supposed lack of maturity throughout. Maybe he wasn’t the right director. Maybe there wasn’t a certain realism or grittiness that most people thought this material should have; especially when the lead character has been raped and murdered yet the rape is never mentioned (although it is well suggested by the quick shot of Mr. Harvey’s unfastened belt buckle) within the film.

Yet, I think what Jackson has done was to tap into a particular spirit inside of Susie, and he allowed that to guide the making of his film. In regards to the rape, I know that I would have found no entertainment or real artistic value in watching this pretty child brutalized and stuffed into a safe. I felt that Jackson handled that material thoughtfully and executed it with just enough force so as to not become irresponsible. It seemed as if he thought about the well being of his actress as well as his audience, something Terry Gilliam completely neglected to do with his beyond repugnant “Tideland,” which also featured the story of a young girl surviving through a tremendously dire experience.

For me, the heavily criticized sequences of the “in-between” represented Susie’s soul at the time of her death. Yes, I can understand any resistance to the New-Age feel of the proceedings and I will say that I really didn’t like the casting of another girl Susie interacts with, as she indeed appears to desire to play some sort of other-wordly “My Little Pony.” However, the “in-between” is childlike because Susie was a child upon her death. She was not mature, her Earthly life was a candy-colored haven, and I felt for her loss deeply. It saddened me that here was this beautiful girl who would never see her endless rolls of film developed, and she would never kiss the boy who loved her. The crime of that loss was felt even as the film segued from the very real scenes on Earth (including Wahlberg’s obsessiveness and a great sequence where Susie’s sister Lindsey sneaks into Mr. Harvey’s house to discover any possible evidence to handover to the police) to the psychedelic landscapes that felt like a 70s lunchbox dream.

In fact, the entire movie, at times felt like a 1970s artifact. Like a film from eccentric British director Ken Russell (who directed William Hurt’s first film, the bizarre “Altered States” from 1981 as well as the 1975 adaptation of The Who’s rock opera “Tommy,” which is one of my favorite films of all time). Or better yet, one of those lavishly decorated double rock albums, complete with gatefold and exquisitely designed lyric sheets. Mostly, instead of the type of drama that everyone would be moved by and would most certainly be destined to win Oscar after Oscar, we have one of those elusive ”love-it-or-hate-it” movies of which there really is no in-between.

I would like to think that Jackson really went out on a creative limb with this film that houses strong performances from the entire cast combined with a hallucinogenic heavenly vision set to Brian Eno’s incredibly moody, ethereal score. But, such risks are not looked upon favorably in today’s Hollywood, and for better or for worse, I’ll take this vision over some homogenized version any day.

Is “The Lovely Bones” really as horrible as many reviews have been declaring? I really do not know and I am confused that my reaction was so profoundly different than most others. I have not read the source material and I knew very little about it when I entered the theater. I do wonder what fans of the book thought about it.

I have to say that throughout, I could not help but to think of a girl I know. She is the 9-year-old daughter of a dear colleague. Susie strongly resembled this child I know as she has gangly arms and legs and much of what I know of her is a devotion to Hannah Montana and all things of candy-colored girlishness. She also is a budding photographer and each time I have had the pleasure of seeing her, watching her grow up, I am startled by her purity, her beauty and that elusive innocence that has not yet become tainted or jaded. The horror I felt of anything taking her innocence away translated to the screen as I watched Susie struggle with who she was, what had happened to her and where she was headed.

If that was what I felt and took away from the experience, maybe Peter Jackson was the right director all along…