Peter Jackson's directorial career has been one strange roller-coaster ride. I became aware of his work in the late 1990's when I and several of my friends discovered his early gore-fest movie Dead Alive (also titled Braindead) and became instant fans. My classmates in high school were always yelling lines like "He's got, THE BITE!" in between classes. It was like the first drop on a rickety old wooden monster of a coaster; rough, and a little nauseating, but a hell of a lot of fun. After that I road the shaky turns of Bad Taste and The Frighteners still enjoying every minute. Then, in 2001, I sped into the smooth, polished, metal loops of a whole different monster with The Fellowship of the Ring. Don't get me wrong, it was still a great ride, just a different kind of ride. After that trilogy concluded, the coaster started to slow down with Jackson's somewhat underwhelming remake of King Kong and then the coaster sunk into a dark tunnel with his most recent feature, The Lovely Bones.
I wanted to like this movie. I really wanted to like this movie. It should be good, shouldn't it? It's Peter Jackson adapting and directing a supernatural tale with unique, quirky characters played by talented actors with visuals produced by the effects artists at Weta-freakin-Workshop. It should be glorious! The story starts of with a young girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) living a typical suburban existence with a somewhat typical suburban family, until she is brutally murdered by her less than typical psychotic neighbor George Harvey. (Stanley Tucci) After that is where the film starts to fall apart. Basically, the narrative forks into following Susie's soul hanging out in some strange waiting-room dimension between here and heaven, and the rest of the Salmon family as they try to come to terms with Susie's disappearance. The father, Jack, (Mark Wahlberg) obsesses over finding Susie's killer. The mother, Abigail, (Rachel Weisz) can't deal with her husband's obsession and abandons the rest of the family to become a migrant worker somewhere. The Grandmother, Lynn, (Susan Sarandon) tries to hold the rest of the family together by moving in and... smoking a lot of cigarettes, I guess. In the midst of all this family trouble, mean old Mr. Harvey is trying to cover his tracks from the murder investigation and throw off Jack's suspicions.
The problem with this whole set-up is that the audience sees all of this unfolding through spirit Susie's eyes. She is able to observe her family and Mr. Harvey in the world of the living, but cannot really communicate with or affect anything in that world, so she feels like a passive player in most of the film. Near the end, she does cross back over and temporarily possesses the body of another young girl to have a creepy make-out scene with her would-be boyfriend, but the less said about that, the better. When Susie isn't spying on the living, she spends her time frolicking around in her postmortem wonderland, filled with whimsical sleigh rides and other such cheery crap. The cuts between these fantastical scenes and the harsh reality of her family's turmoil were so frequent and jarring that I almost got whiplash watching this flick. Sure, all the scenes and post-production visuals are beautifully shot and rendered, but the tone throughout the movie changes so drastically from scene to scene that it seems like two different movies are fighting for the same screen time. I feel like the pieces of a good movie are all present and accounted for, but it's just not put together properly. The whole thing feels rushed, so maybe if the editor would have had more time, I might have had fewer problems. I am also not familiar with the structure or pacing of the original novel by Alice Sebold, but the movie should be able to stand on it's own. Unfortunately, The Lovely Bones, as it stands now, just falls apart.
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