The premise of ""The Lovely Bones"" draws you in with high ideas about murder, death and the afterlife. A girl who is brutally murdered remains halfway between here and the hereafter while she comes to terms with leaving her life, her family and her killer remaining on Earth. Peter Jackson's adaptation of this Alice Sebold novel, though featuring some breakout performances and stunning visuals, doesn't use enough of the machinery for a solid film adaptation to support the ideas.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, ""Atonement"") starts her story explaining that she was murdered as a teenager in the mid-1970s. Her killer was creepy neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci, ""Julie & Julia""). In death, she does everything in her power to stay in the ""in-between,"" an imaginative world between worlds where she watches her father (Mark Wahlberg) obsess over finding her killer while her mother (Rachel Weisz) descends into a nervous breakdown.
The movie cuts between the gritty reality of Earth, where the film mostly aims to be a serial cop drama, and the colorful CGI fantasy world of the in-between. Although the fantasy scenes add some visual pizzazz, their narrative purpose is unclear at times. Susie sits in a gazebo as the seasons change around her—the passing of time? The agelessness of death? You can give Jackson the benefit of the doubt and call it avant-garde, but at times it feels like digital effects for effects' sake.
These scenes also have few ties to what's happening on Earth, where most of the story takes place. Susie's family crumbles as her father obsessively pursues her killer, and Susie does what she can to press him onward. Eventually her sister gets wrapped up in the grassroots investigation, building up to a finale ripped straight out of ""Rear Window.""
What you really need to see ""The Lovely Bones"" for are the performances. Namely, Stanley Tucci's run as an unassuming neighborhood serial killer. Tucci is drained of the confidence of his usual roles, replaced with a bad comb-over and awkward drawl that betrays a fundamental disconnect with the whole of the human race. He meticulously sketches out his designs to kill Salmon, staring into the lens of his camera as he stalks her in the mall and on the way home from school. Just seeing him pass in the background of a scene is chilling.
Saoirse Ronan won a Critics Choice Award this year for her role as Susie, and it was deserved. Her long, mournful wails punctuate a performance that has to transition from teenage aloofness and innocence to the pain and misery of someone haunted by violent trauma.
Susan Sarandon also shines as some comic relief–she plays Susie's chain-smoking grandmother who swoops in to take care of the family as they weather the crisis of Susie's death.
The others are not so great, crowded out by limited screen time and a truncated finale as the focus falls more on Susie and Mr. Harvey. Wahlberg must be a hard man to direct, because like in ""The Happening,"" his performance lacks real emotion in a role that demands it. And Rachel Weisz basically vanishes halfway through the movie.
""The Lovely Bones"" is a far from perfect film—I'd wager that it will make a good case study for that old chestnut ""The book is better."" But some obvious production values in directing and performance make the choppy story and visual design workable. The message about dealing with death for the living and the dead remains intact, and you'll walk away thinking on it, a sign of any great film.
