These Bones May Be Lovely, But the Film Sure Isn’t

Imagine the world. Now imagine it without you into it. That's the sole basis for Director Peter Jackson’s, “The Lovely Bones”, based on a novel by Alice Sebold of the same name. One day, a girl named Susie, “like the fish”, Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) decides to wander into a mysterious cornfield and go with her decidedly creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey, to his underground shelter. Who can guess what happens next? Well, she certainly doesn’t get away, and the rest of the film depicts her in heaven as well as her family in their grieving process.

Understandably, Susie’s death must have been hard to film, and hard to make it appropriate for the younger audiences watching it. However, the whole scene after Susie was killed was rather confusing to anyone who hasn’t read the book, where it is made clear to exactly what has happened. For just a moment it seemed as though Susie had made it out alive, and was really running away from Mr. Harvey, not just leaving Earth. It wasn’t until she was calling for her Mr. Jack Salmon, who was portrayed wonderfully by Mark Wahlberg, that anyone realized what was going on. The death was made harder to understand by the fact that there was no implied death at the underground shelter, just Susie running away, interchanged with picturesque views of the idyllic family life when the Salmons are eating their supper, unaware of what has happened.

When the Salmon family finally does realize what has happened, they are instantly devastated, and there are moving performances throughout the cast, especially Rachel Weisz’s atypical portrayal of the grieving mother. One thing that Jackson neglected to include was the memorial for Susie, where I would have like to see George Harvey, as included in the book. Upstairs, Susie has discovered the not-quite-heaven Inbetween, a place where you can have everything you want, or that’s how it as described in the novel anyways. In the film adaptation, Susie’s heaven was just an array of fantastic special effects, such as the glass bottle with ships in them, but with little relevance to what her heaven was supposedly like. It also appeared as though only Mr. Harvey’s, who was a long-running serial killer, victims were there. Jackson did away with people like Frannie, Susie’s guidance counselor and Bethel Untermeyer, Susie’s old neighbor. While Jackson did do a good job on the visuals of Susie’s heaven, it was a far cry from the humbler version that Sebold took her time to create.

While some of the less important plot details of the novel, such as Abigail (Rachel Weisz)'s affair with Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperiloi, who nailed the "good cop" routine) were scrapped from the film, which makes sense, the ending, however, was true to the book. Stanley Tucci's evil, sinister, and loathsome character of Mr. George Harvey dies in the most peculiar of manners-death by icicle. This happens in both the film and the novel, and then the Salmon family moves on completely, Abigail returning to her husband, and Susie's little sister Lindsey finding a seemingly happy life with one true love Sam. But what of Buckley, Susie's little brother? He doesn't seem to age at all, and just disappears part way through the movie. Poor, overlooked little Buckley. Now Susie, once she has finally fulfilled her life's desire- to kiss Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), decides to let go of all life on Earth and move on to heaven-the real heaven, not the one Salvador Dali created. And yes, all of that happen in the book, a politically-correct Hollywood ending.

Overall I would give this movie a 3/10. Good cast, bad screenwriters. Shame on you Fran Walsh!