Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver, Michael Imperioli
Running Time: 135 minutes (plus trailers)
"My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered"
I have many complaints I wish to make about The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s directorial follow up to King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if I could only make one it would be about the lead character, fourteen year old Susie Salmon. Played fairly well by child actress Saoirse Ronan, who was previously nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Atonement, Susie was never the less a protagonist whose journey I did not care about at all. It didn’t help that the entire film is cloyingly narrated by her, that she comes across as your typical whiny fourteen year old girl movie character, or that any time she is onscreen she is accompanied by the irritating tinkling of a piano. It also doesn’t help that she spends most of the movie dead.
For those of you who don’t know, The Lovely Bones is about a young girl, Susie, who on 6th of December 1973, is murdered. Now you know this going into the movie; and even if you didn’t, she tells you what happens in the voiceover anyway. Now I wouldn’t quite say that I disliked Susie enough to actually be looking forward to her inevitable death, but I was looking forward to the point in the film when her wise-for-her-age voice would stop ringing in my ears. Unfortunately, as the films taglines tells us The Lovely Bones is “the story of a life and everything that came after” and so even after Susie is rubbed out twenty minutes in, she continues to be a presence in the film, distracting from what could have potentially been a very interesting story. Instead what we got was a movie that was over long, overly sentimental and despite its attempts to be deep, contained more unrealistic CGI than it did intelligence or human emotion.
In the wake of Susie’s death her middle class family attempts to deal with the grief of her passing, whilst her killer, a shut in neighbour who gives all middle aged men living alone who spend their days playing with dollhouses a bad name, disposes of her remains and begins to plot his next crime. Meanwhile Susie finds herself exploring some kind of a purgatorial paradise, a strange computer generated wonderland between heaven and earth. It was these scenes, the scenes that featured the films quote unquote main character that really ruined the movie for me. As Susie wanders through a forest that changes seasons in an instant, or dances through a field of wheat that turns to water, I found myself wondering what the point of these scenes were and when we were going to get back to the real world to the characters who were still actually alive.
Jackson does do a competent job behind the camera; the cinematography is strong, the visuals in the “heaven” sequences are generally interesting (although often let down by the overutilization of poor special effects) and the acting from the entire cast is good to great. Most notably Stanley Tucci is very creepy as George Harvey, the sinister killer. But the character development in The Lovely Bones is another thing that leaves something to be desired. Even though Tucci does a good job, the script has him spending most of his time peering out windows or brutishly shutting his curtains…in fact all of his mannerisms seem to scream “child molester”. Hell, would you trust someone with that moustache? Then at the end of the film we get an incredibly frustrating and rather silly resolution to his story that struck me as a desperate (not to mention rushed) attempt to try and tie Susie’s world with the real one.
The most disappointing thing, I feel, is that many elements of the film; the families anguish and the killers machinations, could have been interesting. But Jackson insists on these long, poorly rendered CGI fantasy sequences that add absolutely nothing to the ongoing story, and in fact, giving that the film goes for over two hours, serve as nothing but totally unnecessary padding. Susie doesn’t learn anything in this twilight zone; all she does is mope and impart preachy life lessons onto an audience who (speaking for myself at least) just wanted her to move on. Literally. If you edited out all the scenes featuring Susie after her death and just focused on her grief stricken father’s obsessive quest for justice and her killer’s attempts to get away with his crimes, you would have a film of a more appropriate length that I would probably recommend. Instead we got The Lovely Bones.
The Lovely Bones is now playing in theatres in Australia; it will open in the US on January 15th
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver, Michael Imperioli
Running Time: 135 minutes (plus trailers)
"My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered"
I have many complaints I wish to make about The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s directorial follow up to King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if I could only make one it would be about the lead character, fourteen year old Susie Salmon. Played fairly well by child actress Saoirse Ronan, who was previously nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Atonement, Susie was never the less a protagonist whose journey I did not care about at all. It didn’t help that the entire film is cloyingly narrated by her, that she comes across as your typical whiny fourteen year old girl movie character, or that any time she is onscreen she is accompanied by the irritating tinkling of a piano. It also doesn’t help that she spends most of the movie dead.For those of you who don’t know, The Lovely Bones is about a young girl, Susie, who on 6th of December 1973, is murdered. Now you know this going into the movie; and even if you didn’t, she tells you what happens in the voiceover anyway. Now I wouldn’t quite say that I disliked Susie enough to actually be looking forward to her inevitable death, but I was looking forward to the point in the film when her wise-for-her-age voice would stop ringing in my ears. Unfortunately, as the films taglines tells us The Lovely Bones is “the story of a life and everything that came after” and so even after Susie is rubbed out twenty minutes in, she continues to be a presence in the film, distracting from what could have potentially been a very interesting story. Instead what we got was a movie that was over long, overly sentimental and despite its attempts to be deep, contained more unrealistic CGI than it did intelligence or human emotion.
In the wake of Susie’s death her middle class family attempts to deal with the grief of her passing, whilst her killer, a shut in neighbour who gives all middle aged men living alone who spend their days playing with dollhouses a bad name, disposes of her remains and begins to plot his next crime. Meanwhile Susie finds herself exploring some kind of a purgatorial paradise, a strange computer generated wonderland between heaven and earth. It was these scenes, the scenes that featured the films quote unquote main character that really ruined the movie for me. As Susie wanders through a forest that changes seasons in an instant, or dances through a field of wheat that turns to water, I found myself wondering what the point of these scenes were and when we were going to get back to the real world to the characters who were still actually alive.Jackson does do a competent job behind the camera; the cinematography is strong, the visuals in the “heaven” sequences are generally interesting (although often let down by the overutilization of poor special effects) and the acting from the entire cast is good to great. Most notably Stanley Tucci is very creepy as George Harvey, the sinister killer. But the character development in The Lovely Bones is another thing that leaves something to be desired. Even though Tucci does a good job, the script has him spending most of his time peering out windows or brutishly shutting his curtains…in fact all of his mannerisms seem to scream “child molester”. Hell, would you trust someone with that moustache? Then at the end of the film we get an incredibly frustrating and rather silly resolution to his story that struck me as a desperate (not to mention rushed) attempt to try and tie Susie’s world with the real one.
The most disappointing thing, I feel, is that many elements of the film; the families anguish and the killers machinations, could have been interesting. But Jackson insists on these long, poorly rendered CGI fantasy sequences that add absolutely nothing to the ongoing story, and in fact, giving that the film goes for over two hours, serve as nothing but totally unnecessary padding. Susie doesn’t learn anything in this twilight zone; all she does is mope and impart preachy life lessons onto an audience who (speaking for myself at least) just wanted her to move on. Literally. If you edited out all the scenes featuring Susie after her death and just focused on her grief stricken father’s obsessive quest for justice and her killer’s attempts to get away with his crimes, you would have a film of a more appropriate length that I would probably recommend. Instead we got The Lovely Bones.
The Lovely Bones is now playing in theatres in Australia; it will open in the US on January 15th
