Old Yorker

  • The Lovely Bones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Jackson (2009)

    I can see why Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones was a bestseller but can’t understand why it’s taken seriously.  It’s clever:  the prose, although irritating, is completely consistent and assured; and the narrative hook is, at first, hard to resist.  Susie Salmon recounts her own murder, at the age of fourteen near her home in Philadelphia, and tells the story from heaven.  (To be more precise, she tells it from ‘the in-between’, a transitional post-mortem state en route to heaven, which isn’t limbo or purgatory.  I’ll call it heaven for short.)  The huge commercial and widespread critical success Sebold enjoyed must be due, I guess, to readers being able to treat the story either as literally or as metaphorically as they wish, although I couldn’t work out how the descriptions of Susie’s heaven – containing all the things she loved in human life, except the family and friends who are still alive – were fully interpretable as metaphor.  The same goes, especially, for the tawdry highlight of the novel, when Susie temporarily returns to Earth to have sex, which she left the world too soon to experience – except in the form of rape, by the man who then killed her.

    Susie’s partner when she makes her comeback is Ray Singh, the exotically alluring school contemporary with whom, as an adolescent, she was beginning to fall in love and who loved her back.  Susie and Ray have intercourse through her briefly inhabiting the body of another schoolfriend, the supernaturally sensitive Ruth Connors, who never forgets Susie, devotes herself to intuiting clues about her and other murders committed by the serial killer George Harvey, and divining the whereabouts of Susie’s dismembered corpse.  The sex-after-death occurs while Ruth has briefly swapped planes of existence with Susie.   This episode seems pointless unless Susie is really experiencing the joy of sex.  Even so, I imagine many people take away from the book, and find reassuring, a message at the level of we-never-forget-the-loved-ones-we’ve-lost-but-we-have-to-let-them-go-so-we-can move-on-and-they-can-truly-die.  Alice Sebold is shrewd enough to realise this tired idea needs a bit of pepping up so she makes the reluctance to part company with human life a two-way process – as something that Susie struggles with, as much as her bereaved family.

    It’s obvious The Lovely Bones was a big hit only because of the distinctive way in which the story is told.  And it’s a good title, even if its explanation, supplied by Susie in the closing stages, is also the apotheosis of the novel’s spiritual guff:

    ‘These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.’

    Alice Sebold wants the best of both worlds:  I didn’t like either the book’s swooning supernaturalism or the pressure I felt to try to get below the surface to receive its non-literal ‘meaning’.  On the plane of human existence that Susie has left behind, plenty of the situations and characters are clichéd – the reader is tricked into thinking better of them thanks entirely to the narrator’s extraordinary point of view.  Sebold is unsurprisingly sketchy in telling us how heaven works:  Susie can interact with the loved ones who’ve survived her to just the extent that’s needed to move the story forward (or give it a twist or flourish) – and no further.  She can see what her family and friends are doing when it’s beautiful or enlightening, not when it’s debasing or distracting.  Perhaps Sebold is saying that’s what a higher state of being is – but she makes it hard to distinguish heaven from an advanced state of authorial convenience.  (According to Wikipedia, Sebold is not herself religious.)  And when she eventually disposes of George Harvey, who killed upwards of half a dozen other females in Connecticut and Delaware and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, there’s a strikingly evasive silence about what sort of afterlife may await him.

    Peter Jackson’s screen adaptation is a real stinker.  After less than an hour (less than halfway through), you realise the film is an utterly hopeless cause – incoherent yet monotonous, bereft of momentum, seeming to lack any possibility of getting itself out of the deep hole it’s in.  It was a very odd sensation – I found myself not so much wondering whether to leave the cinema (we didn’t) as almost expecting Jackson to call the whole thing off.   For me, just about the only thing to be said in the picture’s favour, and it’s a very negative thing, is that it exposes the narrative failings and the trashiness of the novel.   (That’s not how the movie is being received in reviews that I’ve read:  David Denby and Stephanie Zacharek both slated it as a travesty of the original.)   The police investigation in the book is, to put it mildly, underwritten:  it’s never believable that the solitary, ultra-suspicious George Harvey isn’t more closely questioned and investigated and never clear what other leads the police think they’re following, or if they’re frustrated at the lack of clues to the killer.  Because the film audience naturally expects this kind of information, its absence – without the constant of Susie’s narrative, which Alice Sebold relies upon to divert the reader’s attention – is glaring.

    The adaptation is cack-handed, though.  (Jackson did the screenplay with Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, who also co-wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy with him.)   The script develops a habit of retaining elements, as if to demonstrate faithfulness to the book, but then drops them.  The result is that their treatment is so cursory they hardly make sense.   The antipathy between Susie’s younger sister, Lindsey, a conscientious student who’s also into sports and weight training, and their maternal grandmother, a boozy, shallow old glamour puss, barely gets a mention here; and Lindsey’s relationship with her boyfriend Samuel has been virtually excised from the script.  So when she agrees to undergo one of Grandma Lynn’s beauty treatments (because she wants to look good for Samuel), the sequence comes out of nowhere and means nothing.  In the same way, we see Lindsey pregnant near the end of the film – as if this will still be as heart-warming as it’s meant to be in the book, in which what develops between her and Samuel is a continuing strand of the story.  There’s a pre-mortem sequence of Susie helping her father construct one of his ships-in-bottles then a shot of him smashing his latest construction after his daughter’s gone; Jackson uses the ships for one flashy CGI sequence later on before forgetting about them – they’re never any kind of illustration of Jack Salmon’s personality or connected to his eventual coming-to-terms with the loss of Susie.  It’s a relief that Jackson and his co-writers cut out the short-lived but ludicrous affair Susie’s mother Abigail has with the investigating police officer Len Feneman – but they haven’t supplied a sufficient replacement motive for Abigail to leave her family and head for a spiritual sabbatical in fruit-growing country in California.

    Watching The Lovely Bones, it’s easy to believe that it wasn’t until he was well into filming that Jackson began to understand the implications of putting it on screen.   The supernatural element dominates the book but, once the material is realised for cinema, it’s competing with two other movie genres – the coming-of-age story and the serial killer thriller.  The material is, of course, a distinctive take on both – the coming of age is atemporal and we know the identity of the killer from the start – but Jackson treats both themes with baffling conventionality, and without any idea, it seems, of how the three core elements of The Lovely Bones might be made to interact when they’re juxtaposed in this way.  The potential complications of the ages of the teenage characters also seem to dawn on the filmmakers too late.  It looks silly, in the scenes before her murder, that Susie appears not just two or three years junior to Ray and Ruth but younger than her younger sister – for no reason beyond the fact that the others are going to stay in this world longer than Susie.  I don’t know at what stage it was decided to replace the sexual intercourse which she and Ray enjoy with a chaste kiss – it almost looks as if it wasn’t until Peter Jackson was confronted with the tastelessness of the sight of the eternal minor Susie, who died after being raped by a middle-aged man, being penetrated by another adult male.  (The ages of the performers playing Susie, Lindsey, Ruth and Ray at the time the film was made were 13, 19, 19 and 21 respectively.)

    Perhaps this softening was part of Jackson’s professed desire to ensure The Lovely Bones was available to as large an audience as possible.  (It’s a 12A certificate and I was surprised by how young much of the Odeon audience was – or maybe they weren’t as many as they were noisy.)  We don’t see Susie being murdered (this is the most compelling piece of writing in the book) or the discovery of her elbow early on in the police investigation.  Yet Jackson reshot George Harvey’s death, to make it more violent, because of negative audience reaction to the test version of the film[1].  Jackson gives every sign of losing confidence to the extent that he lost sight of both the big picture and the details.  (Small but typical example:  Susie’s multi-coloured woolly hat is an important clue to her disappearance.  In order to introduce this into the story, Jackson has her mother present the hat to her – for the first time – on the very morning of the day that she vanishes.  Susie complains how embarrassing the hat is. Jackson then has her put it on after she’s left the house and as she’s receding from her mother’s view.)  The direction of the thriller parts of the story is uneven to say the least.  Lindsey’s frantic search for clues, when she breaks into George Harvey’s house, is reasonably exciting (although utterly conventional).  But the murder itself is botched.  As Susie is about to be attacked by Harvey, she fights back and knocks him over; we then see her escaping from his subterranean den and running across the cornfield where she and Harvey met.  This fleeing figure turns out to be her spirit self – Susie is dead.  In order to fool us into thinking that she’s escaped unscathed, Jackson didn’t need to show her fighting back.  Because he does show it, you wonder why, if she’d temporarily incapacitated her assailant, she didn’t manage to get out.

    The cast’s efforts are inevitably doomed to failure.  Saoirse Ronan, who (with Vanessa Redgrave) was the best thing in Atonement, looks ready in the early scenes to give a good account of herself as Susie but when the girl’s life is cut short it’s no surprise that the life goes out of Ronan too.  Her voiceover narration is metronomic and inexpressive, and you get quickly fed up of her look of wide-blue-eyed wonderment.  (On the rare occasions that she’s allowed to register a human reaction, she’s fine.)    Stanley Tucci is an excellent and versatile character actor, as evidenced most recently in The Devil Wears Prada and Julie and Julia:  it’s typical of the Academy that he’s needed to play a role as garishly unexpected as George Harvey to get an Oscar nomination.  Given all the dreary acting going on around him, Tucci can hardly fail to be the centre of attention here.  And he’s very skilled – he gives the character shadings way beyond what it deserves, especially as he prepares to finish Susie off.  Unfortunately, with the role and the disfiguring make-up he’s been given, he can hardly fail either to be overdoing the creepiness.

    The character of Grandma Lynn seems to have been written up in a desperate attempt to inject some life into the proceedings.  Susan Sarandon does the necessary, although this dolled-up senior citizen is a bizarre creation.  Sarandon doesn’t seem comfortable in her expensive outfits (she rather resembles Danny La Rue, with the difference that he was comfortable) and her broad acting has a what-the-hell quality that feels like the actress’s attitude to what she’s doing as much as the character’s.  In a hopeless bid for light relief, Jackson has Grandma Lynn – she descends on the family because Abigail, who resents Lynn for being a lousy mother to her, is ‘not dealing with the situation’ – perform a pantomime of domestic ineptitude (foaming pans on the hob, overflowing washing machine etc).  There’s an unintentionally funny postscript, though:  when Abigail returns to the family, looking soignée after her stint in the Californian orchards, Grandma Lynn appears, presumably from the kitchen, with her formerly impressive hairdo reduced to a spectacular mess:  a warning against the effects of sustained housework.

    Even allowing for the unusual constraints on character development which they face, most of the actors are vapid – particularly Mark Wahlberg as Susie’s father.  Rachel Weisz is better but doesn’t register that strongly as the grieving mother.  The unfamiliar faces – Rose McIver (Lindsey), Reece Ritchie (Ray), Carolyn Dando (Ruth), Nikki SooHoo (a Chinese-American victim of George Harvey:  she likes to be known as Holly Golightly and acts as Susie’s heavenly guide) – are not interesting ones.  The same goes for Michael Imperioli (Feneman), who’s well known for his role in The Sopranos but whom I’d not seen before.  The film looks to have been cast without any forethought as to how this collection of actors would interact.  (Wahlberg was an eleventh-hour replacement for Ryan Gosling, who clearly knew what he was doing leaving the production.  Gosling has been quoted as saying he was too young for the role.  It’s true that he wasn’t quite 27 at the time and that Wahlberg is nearly a decade older.   But since Gosling had put on weight for the part and Wahlberg looks boyish anyway, it’s not easy to believe that was all there was to Gosling’s departure, a month before filming was due to begin.)

    You might think that, with his CGI track record, Peter Jackson was attracted to the project because of the special effects potential of the world to come.  On the evidence of the finished product, he was attracted to the special effects of everything, without discrimination.  There’s more eerie lighting on earth than in heaven and a sequence like the one in which Susie witnesses her killer in his bath after he’s murdered her is an uneasy mixture of real and fantastic – Mr Harvey’s bloodstained clothes and mud-covered shoes are strewn around but they and the bath are suspended in white space.   Heaven itself is supernally banal, the imagery suggesting a succession of expensively unimaginative cinema commercials.  When Holly encourages Susie to accompany her and the other victims of the killer over the border of the blue horizon and into heaven proper, it’s not surprising that Susie looks doubtful:  she’s being invited to step into the new-dawn landscape of a breakfast cereal advert.  It’s not clear why The Harvey Girls, and Holly in particular, are still hanging around in the in-between but it’s not a good use of time to try working out the post-mortem chronology of The Lovely Bones.  (As in the book, George Harvey is a notably eclectic serial killer:  the murderees range from a six-year-old girl to his middle-aged landlady.)  This is one example of Peter Jackson’s failing to appreciate, even after he’d got the footage, the shocking implications of Alice Sebold’s imagination.  The idea of being stuck in the afterlife with a group of people with whom you’ve nothing in common except that you were all murdered by the same person is horrifying.

    20 February 2010

    [1] ‘We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more, we had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed.’

  • Random Harvest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mervyn LeRoy (1942)

    I think I saw Random Harvest in my teens and had never seen it again until now.  It was funny discovering what I remembered and had forgotten about this well-known amnesia-based movie (based on a 1941 novel by James Hilton).  I recalled little of the plot but the key locations were, for someone with next to no visual memory, surprisingly familiar – maybe it helps that shots of these locations begin and end the film.   Our first sight is of the dark approach to an asylum that houses variously traumatised Great War veterans:  the inmates include Ronald Colman, as a British officer who was gassed and shellshocked so badly that he can’t remember his name or identity.  Random Harvest ends in an idyllic Devon cottage, no less pretty for being a studio construction with a painted backdrop.  It’s in this home-sweet-home that the Colman character has enjoyed a brief perfect marriage with the film’s heroine, played by Greer Garson; it’s here too that, after years of separation of an extraordinary kind, they are properly reunited.

    Colman, known in the asylum as John Smith, wanders out of the place on the evening of Armistice Day in November 1918 and into the nearby industrial town of Melbridge (somewhere in the Midlands).  In a pub there, he meets Paula Ridgeway (Garson), a member of a theatrical troupe performing in the town.  She immediately realises Colman is from the asylum; she almost immediately falls in love with him.  Anxious to protect ‘Smithy’, as she calls him, and to try to nurse him back to health, Paula abandons her performing career and takes him to stay in a quiet Devon village, where they soon marry and have a child.  Smithy takes to writing; he gets a few things published and is invited to an interview in Liverpool for a job on a newspaper there.  On a Liverpool street, he’s knocked down by a taxi and bumps his head in the fall.  When he comes round, he remembers who he was before his blackout in the trenches – his name is Charles Rainier, he’s the son of a wealthy businessman – but all memories of his life in the asylum, and with Paula and their infant son, have been wiped from his mind.   Charles travels from Liverpool to the Rainier family home, Random Hall, there to learn that his father’s funeral has just taken place.   Charles’s siblings are rather put out by his return at what is, from his point of view, a financially opportune time:  their father’s will is about to be read.  (For reasons I didn’t understand – or may have already forgotten – the siblings had presumed their missing-in-action brother long dead but their father, it seems, took a different view.)   Charles is keen to complete his university degree but, since his brother is a hopeless businessman, agrees to devote himself instead to the family firm and attempt to revive its fortunes.

    He’s so successful that, a few years later, Charles Rainier is dubbed by a newspaper ‘the Industrial Prince of England’.  We see him in his impressive office, preparing to meet for lunch with his niece Kitty (Susan Peters), the stepdaughter of one of his siblings.   Charles speaks on the intercom to his secretary, Margaret Hanson, who then comes into the office.  Margaret is none other than Paula Ridgeway.  Since Smithy went off on his overnight trip to Liverpool, her life has been grim:  she tried without success to find her missing husband; her baby son died; she couldn’t get back into the theatre and got an office job instead.   One day, Margaret saw Charles Rainier’s photograph in a newspaper.   She applied successfully to be his PA but he didn’t then and doesn’t now recognise her.  In one of the weirdest bits of plotting in Random Harvest (the competition is fierce), Margaret has struck up a friendship with Jonathan Benet (Philip Dorn), a doctor at the asylum where Charles/John Smith was once a patient.  Benet advises Margaret (with whom he’s in love!) not to tell Charles that she’s his wife:  it might be counterproductive.  Kitty, infatuated with Charles since, as a fifteen-year-old, she first met him on his surprise return to Random Hall, has started writing him love letters.  Margaret, who sees which way the wind is blowing, helpfully arranges for Smithy to be declared legally dead and their marriage to be dissolved.  Charles and Kitty are engaged to be married.   A few days before their wedding, they go to the church to talk with the vicar about hymns; one of these triggers a memory in Charles.  His reaction is such as to make clear to Kitty that he loves another, and she tearfully breaks off the engagement.  Charles knows that he travelled to Random Hall from Liverpool seven years ago but doesn’t know why:  he belatedly returns to the city and Margaret goes too.  They visit the Adelphi Hotel, where he stayed for that one night, and find Smithy’s suitcase still waiting to be claimed in left luggage.   Charles doesn’t recognise it.

    Charles is invited to stand for parliament as a Liberal candidate.  He accepts the invitation and is elected.   Margaret helps with the campaign and, at the House of Commons, he asks if she’ll marry him:  he explains that, as an MP, he needs a wife but that the marriage would be a practically convenient rather than a romantic arrangement.   Margaret, although distraught by the terms of Charles’s proposal, disappoints Dr Benet by accepting it.  The partnership is, to the outside world and from Charles’s perspective, a complete success.  Margaret is the perfect society hostess and his public standing continues to rise:  he receives a knighthood and acquires the reputation of being, as well as a highly successful businessman, a notably humane employer.  Margaret, however, is desperately and increasingly wretched.  With Charles’s agreement, she decides to go abroad for a time; without his knowledge, she spends a few days, before she’s due to sail, in the same Devon village where they were once happy.  She stays at the hotel that put her and Smithy up (in separate rooms) before their marriage.  Meanwhile, Charles is called upon to sort out a strike at the Melbridge Cable Works, which his company owns.  He administers his Midas touch and, job done, goes for a drink in a Melbridge pub before returning to London.  The combination of the once-familiar surroundings and the workers celebrating (as the crowds celebrated on that night in November 1918, when the war had ended) begins to unlock Charles’s amnesia.  On the subject of locks:  he has always kept a key that he found in his pocket when he came to in Liverpool after the traffic accident, although he’s never known what it’s the key to.  The memory-jogging in Melbridge leads Charles to Devon and, via the hotel where he and Paula stayed, to the cottage.  He recognises the creaking front gate, the overhanging blossom on the path to the door.  He turns the key and goes inside.  Margaret had been about to catch the boat train but, as she’s checking out of the hotel, she asked what happened to the previous hotelier.  That’s funny, says the new owner, someone else was asking that same question earlier today.  Margaret hotfoots it to the cottage and calls ‘Smithy!’ through the still-open door.  He turns to see her and cries ‘Paula!’   They embrace.  The End.

    The plot sounds even more bonkers written down (at a length I never intended) than it seems while you’re watching Random Harvest. (Mervyn LeRoy was working with a screenplay adapted from the Hilton novel by Claudine West, George Froeschel and Arthur Wimperis.)  Seeing the film now is interesting largely because it makes you think about what it meant to those who first saw it in 1942.   The popular audience then wouldn’t have believed the story – as a sequence of credible events – any more than did the BFI audience of 2015.  (The film was screened as part of BFI’s ‘Power of Love’ season.)   Cinemagoers of seventy-plus years ago might have felt differently, though, in at least two important respects.  First, they might have been more inclined than today’s audience to see the film’s stars as two identities inevitably made for each other, according to the rules of the Hollywood game, and as thereby transcending considerations of real-life believability.   Second, an audience, during World War II, watching a story with its roots in World War I would, I think, have engaged more directly and deeply with the theme of prolonged and wrenching separation, the hope of eventual reunion.  Knowing the reality of life in wartime and accepting the formal requirements of the romantic drama, the original audience would have been better equipped to cope with Greer Garson’s suffering in silence – better able to accept that the suffering must continue until it’s time for the happy ending.

    It was pretty hard for this present-day viewer even to feel that the ending was happy.   I got frustrated that Margaret didn’t try harder to get Charles to recognise her.   When he finally did, I still felt oppressed.  So much time had been lost and wasted – and Margaret would never be able to forget the lonely years of being in Charles’s company without his feeling much for her (and he might regret and feel guilty about that).  These are not two people who would know anywhere that they were soul mates:  they spend their daily lives together and he hasn’t a clue of who she once was to him.  It’s possible to see the story as an exaggerated but nonetheless frightening illustration of the discontinuity of personal identity and memory.  I realise I’m not responding in the ways the film-makers intended but elements of the movie that I don’t think I misread made matters worse from my point of view.  Random Harvest comes across as less preposterous when it’s most miserable:  Charles’s marriage proposal to Margaret is truly shocking (it would be startling enough even if they’d not been man and wife previously); and the scenes of their loveless married life are depressing because they convey a sense of settled routine.   And even the nonsense gets to you – especially that damned key.   Charles is never parted from it and, as he and Margaret sit in their box at the opera, he fingers the key reflectively.  A true masochist, she keeps her eyes trained on the opera.  I was disappointed too that Charles’s eventual retrieval of his past with Margaret was achieved in incremental drips rather than a blinding flash of recognition – I was hoping for another bang on the head that would somehow restore the three lost years as well as retain their before and after.

    The two leads are better at different stages of the film.   Ronald Colman, fifty at the time, is much too old for the young man whose university career was interrupted by the Great War.  (It seems odd too, both in his pre-1918 life and when Kitty makes a play for him, that there’s no other woman in Charles’s life.  According to a TCM note on Random Harvest, included in the BFI programme note, this is a change from the novel:  the film-makers, alert to the Production Code, had to ‘eliminate [Charles’s] first wife, which [sic] would have made him a bigamist [when he married Paula]’.)  Colman nevertheless plays the wrecked amnesiac John Smith very sensitively.  He looks right for the older Charles but is less expressive in the second half of the film – inevitably so, when the script requires his character to remain in the emotional dark until the eleventh hour.  Greer Garson, though she performs Paula’s saucy stage routine with aplomb, is too grand for the music hall.  She’s a lot more persuasive as Margaret, both the efficient secretary and the gallantly suffering professional wife.  The scene in which Kitty realises Charles doesn’t love her and renounces her claim on him is a silly conception but Susan Peters plays it very well and touchingly.  Colman is good here too – Charles, standing face to face with Kitty, looks at her as if from miles away.

    29 October 2015

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