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.’
