DVDs in Review

The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2009)

Title: The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2009)

Release date: June 28 2010

Certificate: 12

Format: DVD, Blu-ray

RRP: £19.99

Rating: 3/5

Reviewed by Dave Lancaster

Here, Peter Jackson took a break from monstrous epics like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy and ‘King Kong’ to go back to doing something relatively small scale, but still big on imagination. Jackson has triumphed in this niche before with the vastly underrated ghost thriller/comedy ‘The Frighteners’ and ‘Heavenly Creatures’.

‘The Lovely Bones’ is in a similar vein of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ with its mesh up of fantasy and murder, but ‘Heavenly Creatures’ was shot on an obviously lower budget. That meant that otherworldly moments relied on superimposed vistas, splattering violence and people made out of clay (really), while ‘The Lovely Bones’ falls victim to its own production. It’s too slick.

Saoirse Ronan is well cast as Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who narrates the 1970s-set story after being murdered. Alice Sebold’s source novel clearly states that she was raped and brutally killer, but Jackson’s family friendly softfoots the deed and moves onto a slow realisation that she is now in an “in-between world”, which skates between a dreamy heaven and hell.

It leans heavily towards heaven, which is another problem. After copping out of the murder itself, Jackson doesn’t offer many other glimpses of the dark side. The death of a child by a paedophile is given a sort of breezy treatment, in which the victim appears to be better off having a blast in a colourful landscape with her murderer’s other victims, while her loved ones continue to sing her praises back home and do all that downbeat mourning and suffering. Life is hard, but death is easy in Jackson’s retelling of the novel.

Meanwhile back on earth, the killer (a genuinely creepy and deservedly Oscar nominated Stanley Tucci) has covered his tracks and is looking to make Susie’s sister his next victim. Mark Wahlberg (reliving his ‘Boogie Nights’ hair) plays their father, desperately trying to piece the case together for himself while the local cop (Michael Imperioli - Christopher Moltisanti from ‘The Sopranos’) is stumped and bound by police procedural red tape.

Rachel Weisz isn't given much to do as the mother and Susan Sarandon rounds out the stellar cast as Susie’s eccentric grandmother, to provide an insightful cross-section of a united family all coming together and falling apart in equal measure.

Family and relationships are obviously a strong theme in Jackson’s work. Here he gets to try out an ambitious twist in which Susie attempts to help her relatives out from beyond the grave, but this creates a clash of styles (and indeed genres) which hastily merges subtle performances and the grieving neighbourhood DIY-police force of 'Mystic River' with overblown visuals that wouldn’t be out of place in the Robin Williams afterlife drama ‘What Dreams May Come’.

The fantasy sequences are heavy-handed, derailing some, but not all of, the film. Susie’s constant, sappy, teenage narration threatens the rest. However, Jackson is still a great director when it comes to creating thrills by placing underprepared characters in danger, and his use of small town claustrophobia and suspense drives many memorable scenes.

Unfortunately Jackson’s head seems to be in the clouds, which sacrifices a solid story on the ground below and in doing so he creates very little middle ground for the audience to relate to.

There’s a great film trying to escape from a muddled mess, and perhaps a future director’s cut will remedy some of the ill-advised moments as was the case with that other misunderstood ambitious fantasy thriller ‘Blade Runner’.