The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is an uneven, often frustrating grief drama, despite a central performance that makes its losses matter. Adapting Alice Sebold’s novel, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens give Susie’s afterlife a prominence the living struggle to match. We need time with the family to understand what her death has done to them. Instead, the fantasy repeatedly demands attention just as those relationships begin to matter. At 136 minutes, this is not a shortage of time.

Saoirse Ronan makes Susie Salmon feel like a girl whose life we might have wanted to follow without a crime. There is curiosity in the performance, and enough youthful energy to make the interruption of that life painful. The small moments with her family let us see the person whose absence the rest of the film asks us to feel. The early family scenes allow ordinary affection to do the work. They establish how much the film can achieve simply by staying with its actors.

Stanley Tucci brings a different kind of precision to George Harvey, and his menace makes the scenes on earth more compelling than many of the fantasies. The performance is carefully controlled, giving Peter Jackson something disturbing to watch without needing to exaggerate it. Suspense also suits the director’s habit of making us look closely and wait. The difficulty is that the attention paid to danger does not extend with equal patience to the family.

Naomi Shohan’s production design makes the changing landscapes feel like places a girl might imagine; Andrew Lesnie photographs them with a softness that becomes oppressive. Some have an appealing strangeness, and the idea that Susie’s surroundings might change with her feelings makes sense. Yet their prettiness becomes a distraction when we ought to be thinking about her isolation. We were unsettled by the sequence in which Susie runs through town, because her confusion makes familiar surroundings feel unsafe. That is where the visual invention helps us understand her.

Brian Eno’s score is more persuasive, supplying a haunting unease that the pictures do not always sustain. Jabez Olssen’s editing has the thankless job of moving between grief, threat and the changing fantasy settings, and too often the emotional shift feels imposed. A scene can ask us to feel afraid, then leave us looking at something pretty before that fear has settled. The family scenes suffer most from these interruptions.

Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz have too little room as Jack Salmon and Abigail Salmon. Their grief is clear, but the screenplay does not spend enough time on the relationships through which we might understand it. That is a serious limitation in a film asking us to care about a family trying to live after a murder. The fantasy is meant to help us bear that experience, yet its repeated interruptions make it easier to stop thinking about it.

Fantasy can be a useful way of approaching bereavement, especially when ordinary conversation seems inadequate. Here, Peter Jackson reaches for another imagined landscape before the ordinary conversation has had much chance to happen. There is enough in Saoirse Ronan’s performance and Brian Eno’s music to make the film worth considering for their admirers. For the family drama, we would look elsewhere.