The Lovely Bones

I liked several things about the film – the performances, the ethereal prettiness of the girl (from Atonement) and her world and especially the way the 70s is now long enough past that it can be presented in a somewhat mythologized and beautiful way, but overall I was not keen on the film at all. It seemed so shallow and manipulative to me.

The plot was essentially this – girl gets murdered, her family start to suspect someone based on some photos and a dog’s barks, the girl’s sister makes a big breakthrough…and then nothing happens, with some ridiculous karmic payoff coming at the end. The rest is just the most depressing, painful, heart-wrenching suffering a young writer can revel in dreaming up, purely for the sake of the melodrama. It’s just a portrait of a family suffering, a two-dimensional murderer orbiting around them, while a little dead girl watches. There was an opportunity for greatness here – both in the presentation of the ‘in-between’ world and in meditating on what it means to let go, but both were disappointments. The few bravura visual feats mostly given away in the trailer just seemed like an effects department showing off, because they were sterile, all but ignored by Susie and never given any real meaning or solid significance, and while at one point Susie decides it’s time to leave her father to ‘let go’, that’s then tossed aside, she carries on watching the world and Mark Wahlberg’s tortured character carries on in the same way, and we’re meant to imagine his wife coming home in some way gives him closure.

Things just don’t connect the way it seems Jackson wants us to think they do, and there just doesn’t seem to have been enough thought given to why things happen, why the killer goes for random drives around the block just long enough for the sister to break in, why a whole group of dead girls have any need to gather at some tree for hugs, as well as what the rest of them have been doing in the interim, what changes are made by the fact that an afterlife becomes a fact, not a possibility. It just felt so superficial.