The Lovely Bones

Adapting Alice Sebold’s blockbuster novel for the big screen was always going to be a tricky business. The book has prospered through its use of the afterlife and unnamed angels; indeed, the entire novel unfolds from the perspective of the late Suzy Salmon, a murdered teenager who observes her distraught parents, and the local man who raped and killed her, with increasing frustration.

Surely Peter Jackson, the director behind the similarly themed Heavenly Creatures and the LOTR trilogy, could manage to do something with the source material, even if it is focussed on emotional processing rather than narrative? Sadly, the answer is this surprisingly cheap and nasty looking production.

Working from a screenplay that pays little attention to niceties such as plot or characterisation, Saoirse Ronan works wonders with Suzie’s consistently lumpy voiceover, but even the talented Ms. Ronan can’t breathe life into a film that should end after 30 minutes but lingers on the screen for a further two hours.

There is a fundamental tension here; every time The Lovely Bones’ approximation of lifelessness succeeds, the worse it gets as an entertainment. It does not help that Mr. Jackson’s depiction of purgatory, a facile collision of fabric softener commercial and Teletubbies day-glo, couldn’t be any sillier. “Now available in Cherry Blossom fragrance” doesn’t actually flash across the screen but we keep wishing it would; anything to enliven the tedium of this narrative-free vacuum.

Fans of the book may well feel aggrieved by Mr. Jackson’s sanitised treatment of the material, but almost everyone will feel put out.