THE LOVELY BONES review: oh god when does it end, please stop, oh no, it’s still going

(Mild spoiler warning — the ending is discussed in brief detail)

Watching King Kong was one of the hardest learning experiences of my filmgoing life: sometimes your favourite artists make shit. No matter how much you loved The Lord Of The Rings, the magic of the film lay as much in the ensemble cast, high concept dialogue, rich and immersive art design, memorable and stirring soundtrack, and the epic cohesion enjoining the multiple disparate narrative threads over three separate movies as it did in the hands of the director, the one man steering the mind-bogglingly complex and elaborate cinematic ship. Watching King Kong made me realise that the Rings films were a cinematic fluke, a watershed moment in modern cinema, a movie event that had everyone talking, no matter what their opinion was. King Kong was too long, too dumb and too ugly to have come from the same visionary that held the reigns on the Rings beast, surely — at first, denial. Accepting that Peter Jackson was in charge of both films forever dented my propensity to hero worship. If great artists can flip flop so quickly from great to crap, why should I follow or praise or defend to naysayers anything they ever do?

So it is with a heavy inevitability that The Lovely Bones flops dead into cinemas. I remember reading about “Peter Jackson’s next project,” shortly after King Kong was released, with keen interest (I was eager to wash my brain out after the incoherent mess of Kong). Imagine my disappointment when I read a plot synopsis of the novel-upon-which-the-film-is-based, in which the protagonist dies before the second act even gets going. I read this before I knew anything about the technical structure of film, and still alarm bells rang in my head. If she’s killed off early on, how is anything that happens in the movie going to matter? At the time I sighed, and turned my gaze onto Jackson’s next project (which turned out to be Tintin. After seeing Avatar, I want a 3D mocapped Tintin even less).

The Lovely Bones is worse than I could have anticipated. The plot is awful, the characters are flat and thin and universally useless, and the running time is outrageous — it feels like a 44-minute TV script has been stretched out to 135 minutes. There is a single lonely shining light buried in the otherwise depressing tangle of boredom and frustration, but it’s buried deep and early on in the film.

First off, the plot. Or, what little of it there is. Plucky teenaged girl gets lured into a trap, winds up dead (in limbo between Earth and heaven, of course), and fails to move on while the family and friends she left behind shuffle and mope around for a couple of years. I deliberately avoided saying the girl is killed, because the scene is not shown — a great deal of time and effort is spent building up to the terrible, violent climax, but the climax doesn’t come. The scene just fizzles out into a confusing anticlimax, and suddenly, hey presto, there she is in limbo, unable to communicate with loved ones back home. No pain, no suffering, no violence, no sacrifice, no drama or tension.

I can’t think of a worse punishment than the eternal paradise prescribed by major religions. After the first million years you probably would have read all the books ever written, seen all the films ever made, met all the people ever born (at least, the ones that got into heaven as well), and found yourself twiddling your thumbs for the next eternity. Part of what makes life so important and exciting is that it ends. I’ve only got a few decades of life left, I’d better get around to reading that book or writing that script; I’d better make sure my actions and heritige are noteworthy enough that I’ll be remembered well when my time comes. So when Suzie Salmon finds herself in a flowery, confusing, ugly limbo universe I felt a lot more sorry for her than I did when she actually snuffed it. You mean she has to put up with this weightless CGI bullshit for eternity? Bummer.

The sole shining light I spoke of comes in the tension leading up to Suzie’s death (incidentally, in the book she is raped and then killed; in the film there is no implication of the former, and very little evidence even for the latter). Stanley Tucci’s performance (as Suzie’s killer) and Peter Jackson’s shooting style merge beautifully in this scene to convey pure, bone-chilling uneasiness. The scene is tense, fraught, and more than a little scary. But then, like I said, the climax just never comes. The beautiful tension developed just peters out into confusion. If it was an artistic choice to shoot and edit this way, it was a bad one. If it was a practical decision — the MPAA wouldn’t look too kindly on the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl on celluloid — then shame on you, Peter Jackson, for compromising the drama and motivation of your film just to pander to the masses.

Next up, the characters. I’d like to point out now that the acting is universally superb. Saoirse Ronan (do those vowels really go together? Huh) is brilliant. You actually feel her tears, pain, and suffering, even though it has no narrative anchor. Stanley Tucci steals the show in one of the creepiest and best performances I’ve seen in a cinema for a long time. But his character is underutilised and his pay-off is underwhelming. Mark Wahlberg wrings a few sympathetic feelings out of us as Suzie’s confused, obsessed-with-finding-his-daughter’s-killer father. Rachel Weisz actually disappears into the role of Suzie’s mother for a while. Susan Sarandon shows up and totally misfires as the comic relief, but her performance is real. Rose McIver plays Suzie’s little sister Lindsey, and the newcomer proves she has to chops to stand up to the likes of Ronan and Tucci. Judging by the wonderful performances in the film, at least some of Jackson’s directing talent is still intact. Even if he can’t build a coherent narrative, he can still direct actors on set, which is reassuring.

But the characters never get anything interesting to do. You’d think the bulk of the plot would revolve around Suzie’s family trying desperately to pin the murder on the culprit. But the setting conveniently dictates that girls don’t usually get kidnapped and murdered, so the police flounder around and completely fail to even sniff about in the right direction. The killer is meticulous enough not to leave any evidence for early-70s police detectives, and Suzie’s family isn’t proactive enough to go and look for evidence for themselves for a good hour in the middle of the movie. This hurts the film significantly. First of all, you don’t show us the murder so there’s some doubt and confusion as to whether it’s even happened yet or not, and then you ignore the quest for justice in favour of showing how everyone breaks down and fails to communicate and abandons their children, etc. The worst of this comes right at the end, when, finally, some clinching evidence is discovered that could easily convict Tucci’s Mr Harvey as the killer, but it is put on hold in favour of a family reunion. By this stage, after about 90 minutes of ugly, shitty CGI limbo scenes intercut with scenes of Suzie’s family wandering around doing nothing, we are tired, and the excruciatingly slow pace is starting to catch up with us. We want vindication, we want justice. We don’t want an awkwardly emotionless reunion between two characters who should never have been separated to begin with.

This segues into my final major criticism of the film. If you haven’t gathered already, this movie is long. Every single scene in it is about 20% too long. Individual scenes just seem a bit padded, but the whole film suffers immensely under the burden of these gratuitous oversights in editing. It is excruciatingly long, and seems all the longer for having absolutely no dramatic tension or pull. The protagonist loses everything — literally everything — in the first act. There is nothing left for her to lose. There is no stakes to the action, no possible resolution for the dead protagonist. There is a hideously cheesy “resolution” tacked on somewhere in the messy denoument of the film, but I just rejected it wholesale. This isn’t what would happen, this isn’t what I want to happen, so why is it happening?

That feeling of helpless rejection permeates the film from the “death” scene onwards. The middle act is just boring, but the last act, where things are supposedly tying themselves up, I found myself physically shaking my head and thinking “no, no, no” — the delay of the evidence reveal, the shitty character “resolution,” the attempted revelation scene (oh my god, Suzie wasn’t Harvey’s first kill? No way!), and, worst of all, Harvey’s fate had me feeling lost, confused, helpless, betrayed, and bored.

I feel I should quickly touch on the sights and sounds of the film. The film was shot on top-of-the-line digital, but it’s digital nonetheless. It shows in tight, dark or slow-motion shots — it looks ugly and the motion isn’t true. Sure you save money and you have more flexibility, but it just doesn’t look like a movie like this should look. The music, all composed by Brian Eno, is pretty good, but it suffers from the same problem as Where The Wild Things Are — one pop artist is put in command of the entire soundtrack, so it all becomes a little monotonous. The CGI limbo sequences are just as ugly, stupid and flimsy as you’d think, and the film would really benefit from trimming a few of these scenes. Otherwise the film looks and sounds just like you’d think it would, coming from the bombastic and kinetic Jackson.

Anyone who knows me knows that I loathe and abhor any and all forms of police procedural. I watched an episode of CSI once, and nearly threw up in disgust. I even got a little bit bored during the more policey bits in Se7en. But watching The Lovely Bones, in which the major plot strand I could identify with was the neglected murder mystery / police procedural strand, I found myself longing for the truncated, whip-crack-paced style of CSI and all its bastard offspring. I can’t begin to express in words how bad this is, how bad an experience it was for me to be longing for the things I hate the most. A bit like the eternally boring heaven hinted at in the film, I wouldn’t inflict this punishment on anyone.

The Lovely Bones score

18/100

blog comments powered by Disqus