Director Peter Jackson is well suited to adapt the novel for the screen if you think past such mammoth spectacles as King Kong and the Tolkien trilogy to recall the film that brought him to Hollywood, Heavenly Creatures. Like The Lovely Bones, Heavenly Creatures was an imaginative mix of grim reality and colorful fantasy brought to life through animation. Both show a keen sensitivity to the emotional world of adolescents, especially girls. And both involved a horrible crime.
As in the book, the crime at the heart of The Lovely Bones occurs early, and Jackson wisely leaves most of Susie’s rape and murder to the imagination. In a setting worthy of an especially grim fairy tale, the ogre, Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci), lures Susie (Saoirse Ronan) across a cornfield on a dying autumn evening and into a lair below the ground, his “clubhouse” he explains. Afterward, she gradually realizes that she is no longer of this earth but in the “In-Between,” a Technicolor antechamber to heaven whose world of imagination she must cross before reaching the sunny uplands of forever.
But Susie isn’t ready for the journey. The curtain between the “In-Between” and mortal life is thin and she can pass into places left behind. She is a restless soul pondering the possibility of vengeance, her presence felt as an echo to those sensitive enough to hear. Jackson has a good feel for constructing suspenseful scenes and is working from strong material. In this dark morality tale, the question is how and when justice will visit Mr. Harvey before he causes more harm.
The Lovely Bones’ ‘70s suburban setting is recreated in cookie-cutter split-levels set back along winding streets. The film is well costumed and cast. Mark Wahlberg is surprisingly good as Susie’s dad, going unhinged when the terrible finality of her death sets in. Unable to cope with the loss, Susie’s devastated mom is superbly enacted by Rachel Weitz. Susan Sarandon provides comic relief as Susie’s always-tipsy grandmother, a worldly yet utterly impractical woman who tries to keep the household together after mom falls apart.
Laughing with a soulless cackle and trudging along with a stiff gait, Tucci gives Mr. Harvey a skin crawling self-assurance. He is a type visible in many middle-class neighborhoods during those years—the awkwardly suspicious, usually single man, sweaty palmed and going about his business furtively. Mr. Harvey sits in his darkened house across the street from the Salmons, watching like a nocturnal predator for another opportunity to kill. The expressive horror on Ronan’s face is all the acting required for Susie as she gazes across the dimensions at the world she was forced to exit. Her life was stolen just as it began to bloom; her murder changed many other lives as well.
Jackson could have cut a couple of digressions that add nothing but running time to the film. Otherwise, he did a fine job coaxing memorable and often moving performances from his cast and keeping the film largely true to the book.
