Much award prognosticating has been made of Stanley Tucci’s performance as a serial killer in The Lovely Bones. His quiet, creepy Mr. Harvey creates some fabulously suspenseful moments, but the problem with Tucci’s performance is representative of a greater problem with The Lovely Bones: all we get is a collection of asocial tics loosely wrapped in a cloak of menace. There’s no believable cohesion to Mr. Harvey; he’s a monster because he sits quietly in a chair, waiting for the narrative to return to him so he can say something odd that rings with doom.
And so The Lovely Bones is a collection of scenes that are not connected by tone, or narrative propulsion, or really anything but proximity. A good portion of the running time is taken up with montages—a glamorous fashion parade here, a half-dozen abandoned corpses of underage girls there, a wacky sequence featuring Susan Sarandon’s pill-popping grandmother failing at simple domestic tasks (she sweeps dust under a carpet!) over there—and none of them feel like they’re in the right film.
Saoirse Ronan is magnetic as Susie Salmon, the 14-year-old that Mr. Harvey murders, but all she does for the most part is narrate from the afterlife, which director Peter Jackson has imagined as an endless litany of 1970s airbrushed record album covers soaked in painfully obvious symbolism (did you know that roses symbolize innocence?). With all the flaws of its premise, The Lovely Bones as a novel at least felt like a raw, open psychic wound that gradually, over the course of the book, scarred over. It was a book about dying and grief and recovering from pain. Jackson’s adaptation, featuring Mark Wahlberg’s triumphant remounting of his Boogie Nights wig and Rachel Weisz’s inappropriate distance from the viewer, doesn’t seem to be about loss and recovery. Where it should feel intimate and intense, it feels cold; where emotions should be strongest, we get some crappy special effects instead. This tone deafness marks The Lovely Bones as Jackson’s first major failure as a director. 
now that was to the point
I’d say Jackson peaked with LOTR.
I thought the younger sister was very good, until the ending scenes of her future life.
Our society is very, very scared of grief and pain. It is the last taboo, so it seems fitting for a film of this caliber to gloss over it. If the film had focused more on the emotions more, it would probably not be so popular in the mainstream.
Hound Dog.
Jackson peaked with DEAD/ALIVE.
“Jackson’s first major failure as a director.”
Have you forgotten his awful remake of King Kong?
“Jackson’s first major failure as a director.”
Have you forgotten his awful remake of King Kong?
Damn doubt posting. Sorry about that.
As a fan of the book, I absolutely hated the movie. I was lucky enough to finish the book and watch the movie the same evening, and it nearly hurt my soul. It was SO poorly made, missing some of the most interesting points in the book and the cheesy acting and LSD-induced mess that was Susie’s heaven didn’t help.
And since when the FUCK is Holly one of Mr. Harvey’s victims? That’s bullshit. Yeah, a bit of a spoiler, but you shouldn’t be watching the movie anyways. Everyone should do themselves a favour and stop with the book.
King Kong was better than LOTR. A lot better. His best movie continues to be ‘Heavenly Creatures.’
As bad as this movie may be, it will never be as bad as the 9 hour hunk of billion dollar crap that was LOTR. That trilogy deserved awards for cinematography and special effects, but deserved Razzies for Acting, Directing, Music, and Screenplay.
I read this book a few years ago and when I found out Peter Jackson was directing the movie I got really excited. But then after watching the movie I was highly highly disappointed. Although, Stanley Tucci was the best choice for Mr. Harvey!
Peter Jackson is a simpleton hack.
@7: I liked his remake of King Kong, and I’m a King Kong purist.
@13: Have you seen Heavenly Creatures?
I actually have not seen Heavenly Creatures, so I take back my shitty incendiary statement. Clearly he’s a director of tremendous energy and enthusiasm, and he seems like a nice fellow.
A more accurate post would have been “The LOTR movies felt very flat to me, and I did not enjoy them. And this Lovely Bones flick seems very trite and obvious.”
king kong was lousy, heavenly creatures was excellent. end.
“Heavenly Creatures” was excellent, “The Frighteners” was a little cheesy, but thoroughly enjoyable; his early movies were less shocking, less clever, and much, much more forgettable than they’re often made out to have been; the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy was tedious at best, and ranged to mind-numbingly awful if you opted to watch the Director’s Cut; “King Kong” was incredibly, incredibly stupid. And yet this is his first major failure as a director? It must be really awful, which is too bad, because it looked like it might have some potential, which is what I thought of this review prior to the last paragraph. At least they let up on the Lindy West for a moment or two.
I really wanted to like this movie, but there’s really something wrong with it. It didn’t even make me cry and god knows I sometimes cry during Brothers&Sisters.
Everyone who’s hating on Lord of the Rings: I am not a LotR fan by any means, but you can’t deny that he made a three-movie fantasy epic that was as close to an adaptation of the books as anyone could probably manage. I suspect whether you thought it was plodding or not had more to do with how you feel about the source material and the genre. You can’t call it a major failure, because I think Jackson hit all the points he set out to hit, and I think he hit all the major points that moviegoers wanted him to hit, and he gets great performances out of his actors. We could go all day picking at the minor failures of the film, but it’s not a major failure.
The Lovely Bones feels like a failure all the way through: Whatever Jackson wanted to happen onscreen clearly didn’t happen, it’s not a great adaptation of the source material (King Kong, at least, stayed fairly true to the original while expanding and updating it where he felt it was necessary), and he doesn’t get great performances out of his actors. That sounds like a major failure to me, and one that is unlike any of the rest of the films in his career.
I hated the book and will skip the movie.
The so-called “after-life” parts of the book were so stupidly corny that my athiest self could not possibly tolerate it.
All of the disconnected weak narrative and simplistic symbolism problems come straight from the book as far as I’m concerned. It was a shitty book, I’m not sure how you’d get a non-shitty movie out of it.
That ad at the bottom of this page is hilarious!
damn! it changed. it was about seeing your family beaten. it was funny. really.
Compared to a real director – say, Zhang Yimou – Peter Jackson is Ed Wood with a big budget.
I would just like to add some input here and say….Could any of you do any better?? Seriously…This movie made my mother and I cry, and I think you people forget that this was ment to be placed in the 1970s, before crazy sick people really were ever a big thing….The 70s was a pretty safe generation( Though I didn’t live through it, I have heard stories from my mother, I have done research…Ask anyone, it was nothing compared to now a days…) And who wouldnt want their heaven to be like hers? Your own perfect world…And the book is NEVER like the movie. You can put more in the book and in writing than in a movie. Even with interview with the vampire, I loved the movie..but the book was pretty amazing. It wasn’t like the movie at all. Totally different story lines…And as for lord of the rings, holy shit I dont see why anyone would dump on that besides the fact that its pretty long….Which is expected. Amazing fucking movie. I don’t see why everyone hates on this movie….It was really good. The mother was to detached to mom and I…But the father and sister I think did a great job. I never read the book, but it really doesn’t matter…And everyone in Susie’s heaven was a victom of Mr. Harvey! That was the fucking point pretty much…>_> And she wasn’t in heaven…She was in the inbetween. They never showed her in heaven. I’m just saying my input…I think you people are way to hard on him and this film. Until you have done better, I really would suggest you be quiet. How would you feel if you were looked at as a director failure because of this film by all these people? Not just the director but everyone who had a hand in it…Really guys. Fucking cool it…