The Lovely Bones ( 2010 )

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weiz, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, & Saoirse

Directed By Peter Jackson


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380510/

At first glance it seems an odd match:  “The Lovely Bones,” Alice Sebold’s massively best-selling novel about a murdered girl watching over her family and her killer from heaven, brought to the screen by Peter Jackson, the bearded uber-geek behind “The Lord of the Rings.”

But remember:  Jackson came to world attention in the mid-‘90s with “Heavenly Creatures,” a film about teenage girls and fantasy lives and a killing, and he has written his scripts since even before then with his wife, Fran Walsh, adding, more recently, Phillippa Boyens to his screenwriting team.  So there’s always been a significant influence of womanly wisdom countering Jackson’s most boyish tendencies. 

And if that doesn’t convince you that he’s qualified to adapt “Bones,” well, who among working filmmakers is as likely to whip up a dilly of a vision of the afterlife?

As it happens, the paradisiacal home of Jackson’s fallen heroine, Susie Salmon, is more candy-colored and fanciful than you might expect from the man who made us believe in Mordor.  Particularly in contrast with the detail-rich 1970s suburbia “The Lovely Bones” depicts, its heaven is an airy play-scape that morphs in color and form like the innards of a lava lamp -- recollecting the afterlife depicted in Vincent Ward’s groundbreaking, under-seen “What Dreams May Come.”   But, then, Susie is 14 years old at the time of her death, and it’s thus not surprising that her paradise is fluffy, cutesy and girlish.

And, truly, there’s little else about the film for which those adjectives are fit.  Streamlining Sebold, Jackson and company build a zippy, heated, harrowing drama on a triangle of characters:  Susie, her grief-torn father Jack, who seeks his daughter’s killer zealously, and the murderer himself, the grim recluse George Harvey.  With infectious confidence, Jackson switches between the perspectives and obsessions of these characters, as well as those of Susie’s mother, Abigail, her sister, Lindsey, and Ruth Connors, whom Susie barely knew in life but who has an uncanny connection with the dead.  It’s truly virtuosic moviemaking.

But for all the motion and energy and attention to décor and wardrobe and hairstyles, the foundation of the film is emotional.  The devastation of losing a child; the nervous titter of puppy love; the frenzied pursuit of justice; the icy calm of a killer:  Jackson builds and conveys it all with unswerving certainty.  There are moments of heartrending grief in “Bones,” and of sickmaking dread, and of breathless exhilaration.  And in all, as ever, Jackson proves himself a born filmmaker.

To aid him, he’s got a solid cast on hand.  Saoirse Ronan is as persuasive as Susie as she was when she stole “Atonement” from the grownups.  Here, doe-eyed and confounded and rent, she’s fully compelling.  But she doesn’t overshadow Mark Wahlberg, desperate and determined as Jack, or Stanley Tucci, pursing his mouth and composing his body into silent predation as the killer.  Compared to these, the estimable trio of Rachel Weisz (Abigail), Susan Sarandon (Abigail’s mother, Lynn) and Michael Imperioli (the investigating detective) feel a bit like background, which is less a judgment on their work than a reflection of the relative weight their characters bear in the adaptation.

It’s not clear, of course, what the admirers of the novel will make of Jackson’s “Bones”; readers have a habit -- annoying to filmmakers, no doubt -- of having strong ideas about books they love.  But as someone new to the material, I found Jackson’s film soulful, respectful, masterful, horrifying, rending and emotionally true.  It may not be the “Lovely Bones” that you have in mind, but it’s a fine and powerful one.   

Overall Rating ( * * * * 1/2 )

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