Climbing Higher Pictures

After the huge success of The Lord of the Rings, many wondered what Peter Jackson’s next terrific project would be. When King Kong proved to very much not fit that bill, the wait began for the next epic film from the Academy Award winning director. Would it be The Hobbit, Temeriare? Instead he chose a relatively small scale book, the kind of drama usually reserved for indie directors or more distinguished, personal filmmakers. Can Jackson reign in the orchestra and bring The Lovely Bones to life? Find out below:

The Lovely Bones Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: C+

When you take one of the most depressing and disturbing New York Times Bestselling novels of the last decade and go about making it into a movie, there are a number of considerations one must make for the audience. Firstly, people tend to get very little enjoyment out of a story that follows a young girl being raped and murdered and then watches from Heaven as her family and the world she left behind slowly falls apart. Secondly, the entire concept of purgatory or “The In-Between” as the film refers to it, has to be suitably abstract and beautiful so that the audience never thinks that the main character has actually come back to life in the interim between her death and the end of the film. Thirdly, we have to be able to emotionally connect with the characters at a deeply personal level, or else the natural human response is to close down, to distance ourselves from what we are watching, and to hide from what it would feel like to experience the world through the character’s shoes.

Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings, has attempted to tackle these fundamental problems through production values. The movie is absolutely stunning, a gorgeously photographed and quite ambitious attempt at creating a living dreamscape through film. The Heaven is so well realized as to detract from the characters within it, keeping the audience in awe for so much of the time as to avoid the “sinking in” nature of the hero’s emotional journey. We also spend so much time in that world that in order to keep it interesting the designers worked to outdo themselves with each consecutive sequence. Every time we cut away from the real world, the connection to the reality is severed by the glorious imagery of a non-existent space, and the frequency and the potency actually manage to hurt the film as a whole.

In the real world, we have another somewhat contradictory issue at play. Perfect casting. Everyone is so completely suited to their roles, so meticulously fit into the framework of the screenplay, that they never have room to breath as characters. This isn’t usually something which hurts a film project, but you’ll find yourself wondering from time to time why the characters are unable to see the giant camera rig and the whole film crew that must have been standing in front of them, just out of frame. The feel is sweeping and epic, as suits Jackson’s directorial style, but it doesn’t fit with the material. We needed some handheld camera, some static framing, and something grittier to help ground a work which swiftly separates itself from the reality of its own world. Stanley Tucci comes off the best out of the whole cast, a pedophile who is both instantly believable and also not a carbon copy of who Stanley Tucci appears to be as a person. In that way he can stretch, and it’s in the stretch that the true drama emerges.

In hindsight, a lot of what works in the film does so to the detriment of the project. Great cinematography should not draw attention to itself, but here it is presented as a choice which is neither story motivated nor particularly engrossing. The sound design is also perfectly aligned to tear at the heartstrings, though for that action to occur, the film would have to have captured the viewer’s emotions to begin with. Towards the end, the movie begins to resonate emotionally, but by then it is almost too late. The scene that works the best is apparently not in the book at all, and having learned that fact after the screening I can’t help but wonder if it was the book that was being adapted, or the “idea of the book” that made it to screen. There’s enough here to make the film worth a viewing, but it won’t win many awards and it will most likely never make its way onto your DVD shelf at home. I hate to say it, but as someone who had high hopes before I entered the theater, The Lovely Bones is one of my biggest disappointments of the year.