Like the oxymoronic statement of the title, Alice Sebold’s 2002 best selling novel contained bold contradictions
for a novel – on one hand it was a realistic drama about the horrific circumstances of a paedophile murdering and raping a teenage girl and how her family comes to terms with their loss; on the other it was a sentimental look at how even in the most insurmountable odds, people are able to pull together and help one another.
Peter Jackson is not known to flinch at difficult adaptations of books, but even so, after directing such huge epics over the past decade, how would he cope with this personal and deeply touching story? For the most part the answer is “fairly well”. The life of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), the soon to be victim of tragedy, is brought vividly to screen in the first half hour with nostalgic touches of the 70s – from the yellow bellbottoms she wears to the seemingly wholesome suburbia she lives in, there is a real sense of what her ordinary day to day life is like, with, as she states, bad things just happening to other people.
Whilst fans of the book will argue that the integral scene where Susie’s neighbour Mr Harvey (Stanley Tucci) murders her is played down to fit in with the (frankly odd) 12A rating, Tucci’s mumblings and creepy delight in trapping his victim beforehand add enough uneasiness to the scene to make it work. Nevertheless, soon after this the contradictions in The Lovely Bones become an apparent problem.
The Lovely Bones, in both book and film, breaks the convention that if there is a narrator speaking, they have to be alive by the end in order to recount the tale. Here instead, Susie narrates looking down at her family from a limbo between earth and heaven, unable to move on from their lives. Whilst the book deals with this in a complex manner, as Susie dwells not only on the important aspects of earth but also aspects that, as a 14 year old girl, are important to her, the film is unable to bring the same amount of detail to this otherworldly narration. This therefore makes the parts where the film switches back to the real world, and Susie’s father’s (a well cast Mark Wahlberg) increasingly desperate attempts to find her killer, much more interesting.
Consequently, whilst there are occasional exciting set pieces as the noose around Mr Harvey’s neck tightens, including one fun Rear Window-esque sequence, the point of the story is almost entirely lost – Susie’s poignant struggle between watching her family’s lives evolve and moving on completely is skirted over for the picturesque, if ultimately not as worthwhile, graphics of her fantasy landscape. Perhaps the book just grapples with too many varying concepts to make it into a well balanced film, so that unfortunately, Jackson’s adaptation, whilst still more than just a by-the-numbers serial killer thriller, is stuck in its own limbo between compelling creditability and vague sentimentity.