A girl dies by the hands of a serial killer who lives next door to her house. We are shown the aftermath of this tragedy through the ghostly eyes of that little girl herself as she observes life moving on without her in it.
Fans of the book by Alice Sebold will absolutely hate this movie and demand the firstborn of Peter Jackson for sacrifice. Going into The Lovely Bones I had no idea what to expect and as I squirmed in my seat wishing it would end already with 30 minutes left, I felt the same way I did when I went to get my wisdom tooth pulled. Just like the accursed tooth I waited in anticipation of an end while the dentist pulled and pulled and pulled. When I heard the popping noise as the tooth was extracted from my gum, it was not a sense of relief but one of annoyance at the length of time it took to pull that bad boy. This was me during those last minutes as I motioned my hands to the screen expecting it to wrap itself up but having to suffer through the long, confusingly drawn out process of an unsatisfying climax. If you want to know what bothered me the most about The Lovely Bones, I will rifle them all off to you in one lengthy paragraph of specifics. Here goes:
The teenage girl Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) had huge posters of her father in her room, (at least the guy looked just like her father), this struck me as odd, which kid does this? When it came time to pass out accusations around the neighborhood, the father somehow neglects to finger the single man who lives across from him in a big green house who crafts doll houses and tends roses as a hobby. Both dad Jack Salmon (Mark Walhberg) and mom Abigail Salmon (Rachel Weisz) have dark hair and dark eyes, hell even Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) was of dark features yet all three children are blonde haired and blue eyed, I’m no expert on genealogy but that was just odd to me. Near the end of the movie we see a parking lot sans fencing atop a cliff with a drop-off that would kill anybody that slips off of it, where are there such parking lots and why are they allowed to exist?
The soundtrack though excellent, had me reminiscing of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the acid trip that was heaven added to my reminiscing. Then there’s the misleading title, having not read the book I went through the entire movie wondering about the title as nothing within it revealed what the lovely bones were. I assumed they would find a body and maybe a cop would say something like, “hey poor kid, such lovely bones” or something along those lines to make it all come together but no. We are left with a poetic reading that happens right before the credits roll:
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
It left a vacuous feeling of disappointment at the closing, there was such a build-up and such a lengthy watch just to end in a lull cadence that melts down to nothing and you wanting the two hours of your life back. It’s no doubt religious types and death chasers will find The Lovely Bones a treat, the message behind it all will no doubt cater to their ideals.
From what I understood of the book, the bones were people’s lives that got changed for better and for worse by the death of one little 14 year old girl. People moved on, women got pregnant, sick people healed, relationships broke apart and mended even steadier, etc. etc. Peter Jackson only gives us a glimpse of that portion within the movie choosing instead to show us the happy scenes Susie experiences within the afterlife (graphics over substance to feed the ignorant movie audience, thanks Pete) and took out key occurrences that would have drove the point home behind her death. It didn’t work for me and as I got through most of the movie it began to feel really, really drawn out and flawed. For me it was worse than not consummating sex, or being stood up on a date with a pretty girl. I wish I had left it alone to begin with.
Cinephile and opinion writer, Greg Dragon has been a fan of movies since the 80's when Kung Fu theater was all the rage and Roger Moore was James Bond. As an opinion writer that has reviewed Box Office releases on a number of prominent websites, Greg is the founder and lead critic of Spicy Movie Dogs.
