 Thoughts are often abstract – to capture them in words is easy. You can create whole worlds with just a swish of the pen, or patter it out on your keyboard. However, how can one depict something as abstract as death, pain, love, the beyond, and the beauty of it all in a moving image without it looking completely fake or ridiculous? Taking a cue from the surrealists, The Lovely Bones manages to be abstract and beautiful; poignant in flashes, just a little hollow. To anyone who has read the book, the film has to be a bit of a disappointment, regardless of all the loveliness that the imagery provides.
The Lovely Bones book was such a hit because of the way the story was woven in and out of situations and between two worlds. What makes the film so hard for fans of the book to swallow is the fact that the tightly told story is lost within Peter Jackson's vision of the film. Which by the way, has picked on all sorts of visual imagery from the book and translated it beautifully to celluloid. So just for a moment, forget you ever read the book, and focus on how The Lovely Bones seems like a Dali painting in motion. Do it for Star Wars and the rat monkeys.
There is something so haunting about how red roses dot bright scenes and mar photographs and appear shadow-like in ice. To see those flowers replicated by Stanley Tucci's dollhouse-constructing George Harvey is positively frightening. George Harvey on the whole is a calmly smiling, disturbingly normal man. What I mean is, Stanley Tucci has brought Alice Sebold's words to life – his depiction of Harvey is the kind that makes your throat tighten with repulsion and fear. He talks Saoirse Ronan's Susie Salmon into a corner with just a few hurt sounding words and painfully eager demeanor. To think that this is the same man who played Julia Child's endearing husband in Julie & Julia is, well, unthinkable.
Susie Salmon herself is a believable character; she died at 13, wanting all the inane things that 13-year-old girls want. Her heaven is a gazebo where she promised to meet Ray Singh, the boy of her dreams for eternity (only because she died). The way she looks on to her family throughout the film is heartbreaking. No daughter likes seeing her father breaking down and her heaven getting flooded with ships in bottles when her father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg) does, is more heart-rending than any anguished sob she could have let out.
Mark Wahlberg is perfectly the obsessed, possessed, and driven-to-madness-with-grief father. Who would have thought back in the day that Marky Mark is capable of such depth? Rachel Weisz on the other hand is kind of non-existent as far as the film is concerned, though in the book we did follow her adventures once she leaves her family. And although Grandma Lynn is kind of an alcohol abusing golden girl even in the book, Susan Sarandon makes her look completely in need of rehab.
That said; none of these characters, none of the beautiful scenes that were created for the film, nothing basically, manages to come together in the film too coherently. And I am not saying that just because I loved the book, which I did, but just because movies are supposed to unbelt stories and let them run free, not pull them back in with too-long pauses, or weird editing which unlinks one thing from another (of course, if the weird editing was intended, my apologies to the editor and Peter Jackson) only to unleash them again. But still, if you manage to keep the book out of your mind for a bit, The Lovely Bones is rather lovely.
– Amina Baig
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME |
