No flesh on `The Lovely Bones`

no flesh on
The
Lovely
Bones
Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel privileges
style over substance, writes Brian McFarlane.
46 • Metro Magazine 164
aBOVE: Saoirse Ronan, who
stars as Susie Salmon in
the lovely bones, behind
the scenes with director/
co-writer/producer Peter
Jackson
The opening image of Peter Jackson’s film
adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2009)
is that of a penguin in one of those glass
snow domes. As the voice-over spells
out, what you get before you shake it is ‘a
nice life – trapped in a perfect world’. Onscreen, a little girl is playing with a top as
her father reads. A few brief shots later, she
is a teenager with a camera, ‘capturing a
moment’, and a few further moments later
we hear her repeat something her Grandma
Lynn (Susan Sarandon) has said, ‘We were
not those unlucky people to whom bad
things happen,’ to which she adds, ‘As
usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.’ In other
words, these opening words and images
have been setting the film (and us) up for
the utter dislocation of what has seemed
permanent. Perhaps the shot of a fridge
being tipped into a rubbish pit should have
been seen as a warning, as the voiceover hints, about ‘the way the earth could
swallow things up’.
Up to a point, this is the concern of both
the film and Alice Sebold’s highly regarded
2002 novel: the rupture of the seemingly
secure by an act of arbitrary dreadfulness.
In both, the Salmon family is riven by the
disappearance of its eldest child, Susie.
In the novel’s opening lines, she tells
the reader, ‘I was fourteen when I was
murdered on December 6, 1973,’ and in the
film, Susie’s voice-over informs the viewer
in the same words, just after her reference
to Grandma’s chronic wrongness. Most of
the key events of the novel are transposed
to the film and it ends on the same note,
with Susie’s blessing from heaven, ‘I wish
you all a long and happy life.’ So why
do the film and the novel feel so utterly
different from each other, even allowing
for, as one always must, the move from the
words-on-a-page semiotic system to one
of moving images and sound? I am not one
of those people who inevitably finds the
film version of a famous novel inferior, but
in this case I couldn’t help but wonder why
the novel seemed so satisfying and subtle
and the film so not.
There is something shocking in the very
matter-of-factness of the novel’s tone. Not
just in the appalling opening sentences,
but in the almost casual way Susie reflects
on developments, or lack of them, in the
matter of finding her murderer.
In the hours after I was murdered, as
my mother made phone calls and my
father began going door to door in the
neighbourhood looking for me, Mr Harvey
[the murderer] had collapsed the hole in the
cornfield [the murder site] and carried away
a sack filled with my body parts.
And nearly a year after: ‘By late summer
1974, there had been no movement on
my case. No body. No killer. Nothing.’
This first-person commentary is hugely
important for establishing tone of voice;
Sebold is clearly aware that a plain, almost
prosaic articulation reinforces the horrific
‘What can possibly happen?’ The answers
are ‘She does’ and ‘A great deal’.
Even before I came to the novel’s fleeting
reference to Thornton Wilder’s play Our
Town, I’d thought to myself that not since
that beautiful paean to ordinary life had I
come across this representation of a dead
person’s view of what the living are up
to. Susie, often (and wittily) through her
dealings with Franny, her ‘intake counsellor
[sic]’, raises issues about life and death,
about how the living cope with death (for a
terrible moment I thought Franny might tell
her to ‘move on’, but the novel is far too
smart for such crappy advice):
‘When the dead are done with the living,’
Franny said to me, ‘the living can go on to
other things.’
‘What about the dead?’ I asked. ‘Where do
we go?’
She wouldn’t answer me.
This is not a book that suggests that being
dead is as much fun as living. It is astute
about how people deal differently with a
death in their midst. If it is not merely a
gloomy tract, and it is not, that is because
of Susie’s measured appraisal of facts as
she sees them, and then what she makes
of those facts.
event and the strangeness of the situation,
and the consistency of the dead girl’s point
of view is crucial to how we receive the
narrative of what goes on between heaven
and earth. Intermittent voice-over is no
equivalent for the kind of focus, for the
emotional shading, that colours everything
we know in the novel.
We come to value those perceptions that
work sometimes to summarise, sometimes
to predict, sometimes to just reflect on her
experiences in both ‘places’.
I could not have what I wanted most:
Mr Harvey dead and me living. Heaven
wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that
if I watched closely, and desired, I might
change the lives of those I loved on earth.
In an early comment like this one, Sebold
sets up narrative expectations – along
with niggles like ‘Can she keep it up?’ and
When my father’s car pulled into the drive,
I was beginning to wonder if this had been
what I’d been waiting for, for my family to
come home, not to me any more but to one
another with me gone.
And this is a far more moving aperçu than
anything the film comes up with.
I’ve taken more time than I usually would
in writing about the novel. I’ve done so not
because the film is ‘different’ – of course
it is – but because it is so immeasurably
inferior as a work of narrative art, because
it has taken off from the novel’s startingpoint and done such heavy-handed things
with it. Voice-over Susie talks of ‘capturing
a moment’; this is not Jackson’s way of
going about things. It’s as if he’s hardly registered for long enough what any moment
might have to offer. I suppose I should
above: susie
Metro Magazine 164 • 47
which he entices Susie, and her unsuspecting family home where her mother, Abigail
(Rachel Weisz), is preparing dinner. There is
real tension in the scene in Harvey’s hideout in the moments leading up to the monstrous rape and murder, filmed, it should be
said, with proper restraint and followed by
a strange grey-blue glow that is Jackson’s
way of rendering Susie’s having died and
of her being in the process of removal to
another element.
So far, so good. But from here on, the film
dissolves into a series of tedious visual
decisions that Jackson characteristically
settles in the most flamboyant ways possible and with scant regard for any com1
come clean at this point: Jackson does not
make films for me. I can’t stand the Lord
of the Rings trilogy in all its pretentious
blockbusting showiness. It’s not that I’m a
soured-off aficionado of Tolkien’s trilogy –
I’m not a fan at all – it’s just the non-stop
floridness of Jackson’s cinematic imagination that I find so wearisome. He can’t bear
to linger: his filming style is the cinematic
equivalent of shouting hysterically, of constantly setting out to shock the viewer with
some new image, to take the breath away
with some flamboyant coup d’editing, so
that one mightn’t notice the absence of
a mind at work. In The Lovely Bones this
flashy style tends to render the film, at key
points, just vapid and silly.
All right, Jackson is not making his film for
me, so what, objectively, does it offer? Well,
for about the first forty-five to fifty minutes
of its (over)length, I was sufficiently held.
The first crack in the ‘perfect world’ symbolised by the snow dome appears when
Susie’s little brother, Buckley (Christian
Thomas Ashdale), is on the brink of death
after swallowing a twig, and Susie (Saoirse
Ronan) grabs her father’s car keys and
races him to the hospital. This is executed
with some very adroitly managed, rapid-fire
cutting, and the ensuing car chase to the
hospital is brilliantly filmed. All this is part of
a sort of prologue to the statement of the
opening sentence of the novel intoned on
the soundtrack by the dead Susie. There is
a brightly lit sequence in a shopping mall in
1: Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) and susie
2: Abigail Salmon (Rachel Weisz)
48 • Metro Magazine 164
2
which sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) is struck
by a display of dollhouses (Mr Harvey’s
work?), and Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie),
the Anglo-Indian student Susie fancies,
appears and we hear Grandma’s verdict –
‘He’s cute’ – and her advice to Susie, ‘Just
have fun, kid.’
What is happening – and it grabs the attention firmly enough – is the establishment of
an ordinary family to whom the odd crisis
occurs as it might to any. Then comes the
undermining idea that the neighbourhood
is no longer the safe haven, the ‘perfect
world’. Susie’s voice tells us: ‘A man in
my neighbourhood was watching me,’
and, a little later, ‘My murderer was a man
from our neighbourhood.’ Provocatively,
the film then cuts between Mr Harvey
(Stanley Tucci) at work on his dollhouses
and Susie’s father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg),
at his hobby of making mini ship models
to fit in bottles. Is the film hinting at some
sort of dark alter-ego idea here? There are
further unsettling cuts between Harvey’s
underground warren in the cornfield, into
plexity of meaning. In bursts of rhetorical
visual flourish, he depicts heaven as, say,
a sunlit hillside topped with a decorative
tree, or as a gazebo from which Susie and
heavenly sister (to invoke the last Jackson
film I’ve admired) Holly (Nikki SooHoo)
exchange views on whether they are meant
to be looking back (vengeance) or forward
(reconciliation of the dead with the living).
‘You have to leave. You have to let go,’
says Holly. Elsewhere in heaven they are
found in a sort of topiarist’s paradise, with
green sphere and shrubs shaped as animals. The visual style is so over-elaborate
that it obscures what might be significant
matters of life and death. Of course there
are moments when the physical aspects
of the filming work, as when Susie traces
the murders ‘in a room under the earth’,
but this is vitiated by the sentimentality of
the golden glow in which she is later united
with Harvey’s other victims in a heavenly
field. It’s almost as though we are meant
to see death (even if preceded by rape
and murder) as somehow OK if you only
give yourself over to the compensations
of heaven. If heaven is really anything like
what Jackson suggests, I’m simply not
going.
It is not just the hysterical visual style that
makes the film’s 135 minutes such a taxing
experience. The utter loss of any coherent
point of view – and Susie’s occasional
commentary cannot provide this – reduces
the film to a series of arbitrary episodes.
When Abigail leaves home and fetches
up in a Californian vineyard, there is no
adequate sense of what has provoked this
departure. Sebold led into this via a clear
distinction between how she and Jack
have coped with the rupture of their family
life, and there is vestigial but palpable
sexual attraction between Abigail and the
investigating cop, Len Fenerman (Michael
Imperioli). The film doesn’t make nearly
potent enough her sense of how Susie’s
death has affected her.
But essentially Jackson can’t make visual
pyrotechnics achieve what Sebold’s words
do, and because he seems to want to
do so, the film just doesn’t work. As a
contrast, consider how Jane Campion’s
Bright Star (2009) again and again makes
visual representation create delicate and
exquisite effects to invoke the beauty of
Keats’ poetic diction – not to ‘illustrate’ it
but to take advantage of the film medium
to create a poetry as vivid and evocative
in its own right. The measure of Jackson’s
failure is not that he has been ‘unfaithful’
to Sebold’s original vision but that he has
allowed stylistics to obscure anything like
serious meaning. Every now and then the
film lapses into conventional storytelling
habits – in, for instance, some of the police
procedures or in the plucky-girl-in-danger
episode when Susie’s sister Lindsey breaks
into Harvey’s house – and one is grateful
for the respite from the St Vitus’ dance
assault of editing and bravura effects.
persuasive as a likeably ordinary father who
proves capable of obsession; Weisz is given
too little to enable us fully to grasp Abigail’s
ambivalences; Tucci understands, or at least
makes us understand, the vileness beneath
his deceptively mundane exterior; and Susan
Sarandon (her first grandmother role) offers
welcome relief whenever, cigarette and
drink at the ready, she appears. This is an
actor’s film, but a director with an uncertain
aesthetic sense and intellectual grasp has
been given his head. As I said, Jackson
doesn’t make films with me in mind, but
even his Lord of the Rings fans are likely to
be unenthusiastic about his latest.
Brian McFarlane is adjunct associate
professor at Monash University, Melbourne.
His most recent book is The British ‘B’ Movie,
co-authored with Steve Chibnall for Palgrave/
•
Macmillan, London.
None of this is the fault of the actors, who
admirably do all they can with their wispily
written roles. Saoirse Ronan as Susie is both
ordinary and extraordinary: she could cope
believably with the full burden of Susie as
Sebold envisaged her; Wahlberg is equally
Metro Magazine 164 • 49