The Lovely Bones

While Peter Jackson is best known for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the film that marked his transition from low-budget horror/comedy to major-league filmmaking was 1994's artful Heavenly Creatures (which introduced one Kate Winslet to the world, incidentally). It's possibly his masterpiece, balancing exceptional performances with stunning visuals and superb special effects while telling what is, on the face of it, a shockingly brutal (and true) story– teenage friends Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murder Parker's mother when they are threatened with separation – in a beautiful, dreamlike manner. Similarly, The Lovely Bones is a personal narrative told by a murdered 15-year-old girl, observing the effect her death has on those around her from her vantage point in a very individual afterlife. She sees what happens to her parents, her siblings, the boy she loves, the man who killed her and so forth, but from a strangely detached perspective. Sounds like a perfect match, right?

Unfortunately not. The only way to explain what's so utterly wrong with this film is to invoke scale: The Lovely Bones is a small, personal story and Jackson's approach is the same incredibly expansive one that guided LOTR and King Kong. The result is a film that pulls in two wildly different directions, between a character-driven story of personal grief and a huge visual extravaganza. And generally both things are done well: Jackson's enormous digital heaven is visually rich and hallucinatory (seasons change in seconds, armadas of ships in bottles charge the beaches), and most of the performances are first rate with Saoirse Ronan especially good in the lead role of Susie Salmon – but the two elements don't mix at all. Mark Wahlberg's alternately wooden and hysterical performance as Susie's father Jack doesn't help matters, although the always-reliable Rachel Weisz (as her mother Abigail) and Stanley Tucci (as George Harvey, Susie's murderer) almost make up for it.

The film also suffers from the typical problems of book adaptations in that characters' roles are trimmed to the point where they're barely necessary. This is especially true of the character of Ruth Connors (Carolyn Dando), the weird girl from school who is the only person who can sense Susie in the physical world but barely registers in the film, leaving a frustrating sense of a larger story on the cutting room floor.

What's left, then, is a series of often-great performances linked by frequently incredible set pieces that seem to belong in entirely different films. As a showreel for Ronan and the work of Weta Digital, it's a triumph. As a film, it's a disappointment.

Extras None

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