Ignoring this omen and walking on air in anticipation of her first date, Susie is enticed down the rabbit hole that her strenuously innocuous serial-killing neighbor (Stanley Tucci, barely recognizable and supremely creepy) has prepared as her death chamber. Susie’s first kiss, about to be delivered by her first crush, is interrupted-and rudely de-romanticized-by the school principal’s irate tantrum over the anatomically correct female nude that Susie’s weird friend drew for art class. Published in the aftermath of 9/11, The Lovely Bones‘ adroitly comforting synthesis of Our Town and Anne Frank was widely appreciated as a lyrical tale of grief and reconciliation, but it is also a malign fable of adolescent coming-of-age.
Jackson hits the high points of Susie’s young life, speeding toward her brutal demise-but not so quickly as to bypass the novel’s provocative cautionary setup. The actress, outstanding as the child snitch in Atonement, is engagingly hyper-expressive, and the filmmaking is similarly kinetic, full of floating camera moves and breakneck cross-cutting. The Lovely Bones begins with a flurry of activity, both inside the snow globe that’s introduced as a metaphor for the afterlife, and outside in the prosaic, comforting suburban universe into which Susie (Saoirse Ronan) was born. Part Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, part Fritz Lang’s M, the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous. In Jackson’s hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling.
Dreamworks StudiosĪ one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the ’00s loose on one of the decade’s prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter “ Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s bestselling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath, narrated by its 14-year-old victim from heaven.Ī season that has already brought adaptations of a once-controversial classic picture book about a disturbed child, and its grown-up Doomsday evil twin (“normal” child on the road in a disturbed world), is capped by a vision dramatizing the ultimate parental nightmare.