The Lovely Bones

Guest critic Rollie Schott saw Peter Jackson's new film, The Lovely Bones, and kindly shares his review below. Let's just say he didn't like it. At all.

The Lovely Bones

By Rollie Schott, January 20th, 2010

Heaven is a pharmaceutical commercial. I did not know that.  As I watched young, happy rape victims frolic through the fields of the great beyond, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were allergies in heaven. When new girls were introduced, I expected them to explain with a smile that their genital herpes outbreak was being suppressed. Thanks Valtrex.

Peter Jackson’s transcendentally awful “The Lovely Bones” offers one of the most materialistic interpretations of heaven I’ve seen. It is glossy and pretty and all surfaces. Its aim is not aching beauty, which would require some semblance of context, but a kind of “aw, neato” mentality that makes paradise look like a superficial, virtual collision of Thomas Kinkaid and “Tron”. That what is most commonly and theologically accepted as a rational model of heaven is not filmable (and if it is, there’s no way it could be interesting) is beside the point. But I’ll get to that later. Jackson’s efforts seem to be directed more toward making a higher existence more palatable for the “Twilight” crowd. In other words, he is trying to dumb down heaven.

“The Lovely Bones” is about a girl named Susie Salmon, played earnestly and sincerely by Saoirse Ronan who, mark my words, will be one of the premier actresses of the next twenty-five years. Susie, in spite of having parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) spawned from Hallmark cards, is very much your ordinary teen. She has a crush on a senior boy at her high school. She rebels against her mother’s fashion designs. She has hobbies and talents and a desire to be popular at the expense of social coercion. Her delightful innocence makes things just a little too inevitable, doesn’t it.

In the film’s opening sequences, illuminated by a tender narration from Susie, a moment is recalled from her early childhood when she saw the snow globe on the mantle for the first time. Susie recalls the sadness she felt for that poor penguin inside, his unfortunate isolation and loneliness. Her father, apparently having listened in on the narration, offers comfort by assuring her that said penguin has a happy life. He gives the globe a shake and swirls the recycled snow into the microcosmic atmosphere.  “He lives in a perfect world,” he says - a subtle and profoundly misguided metaphor.

But one night she is led into an odd little bunker by her seemingly nice enough (to her, incredibly shady to us) neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) who rapes and murders her and disposes of her body…somewhere. She finds herself in the afterlife before she realizes, and I’m pretty sure before she’s even dead. She races through a series of landscapes, each one more lavish and less grounded in substance than the last. The lines between her universe and ours become more uncertain, more so for us. 

The membrane separating these existences is permeable, but its permeability is in a constant state of frustrating fluctuation. Susie sees the bottled ship models she made with her father crashing ashore on the coast. Within them is the reflection of her father breaking down in hysterics. Now she sees the gazebo where she was supposed to meet up with her new boyfriend, floating in a swamp at the base of some mountains. Now she just turns around and there we are, and the only distinction between heaven and earth is in the editing techniques.

She watches her parents struggle to cope. Her mother falls into a state of perpetual, quiet depression, while her father works feverishly to aid the police in their investigation. After eleven months, their healing has not progressed. Something must be done. When eleven months became a barometer for this process I’m not real sure. Susie’s grandmother (Susan Sarandon) is brought in to help them cope by way of a house-cleaning montage set to “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)”.  Her presence provides the comic relief that Jackson seems to think is necessary in a movie about coping with loss. Her presence fails. Mother moves out.

Meanwhile, George lives vicariously through the memory of his last conquest next door while Susie’s father and sister begin to harbor suspicions of him. The film threatens to become a murder mystery in which the only mystery for the audience is the superfluous location of the body.  A little black book is introduced with the capacity to cement George’s guilt. Said book is immediately forgotten by the narrative in favor of a cloying reunion. No one seems to give any thought to the notion that George might one day kill again.

All the while Susie is watching, her backdrops shifting like a kaleidoscope of Technicolor landscapes. She is exposed to George’s past victims for reasons unnecessary. They frolic in meadows together. They’re so happy. We should all be so lucky. Susie’s ability to continue from the “in-between” on to heaven seems bound by her parents’ ability to live with her death. Maybe if she was a big girl she could have gone ahead without them. Finally, in a moment of incomprehensibly broken boundaries, Susie’s last wish is granted - Her first kiss. Yes, in the spiritual realm, physical contact will be your most revelatory sensation.

This brings me back to that rational model of heaven. Many theologians have hypothesized that there is a higher existence, though not likely a higher intelligence. The key word is existence. To be. What we leave behind are our bodies, which are vessels for sensual and emotional  sensations. What we see, hear, smell, taste and feel are physical sensations that we graduate from in death. For this reason, it seems unlikely that heaven would be composed of sentimental images when we’ve moved beyond our eyes, familiar sounds when we’ve moved beyond our ears. 

Our brains, through chemical reactions and electrical currents, formulate the emotions we experience.  Love, fear, envy, anger, our deepest desires and feelings are born from a mind we also graduate from. With death we are freed from the impurities of existence. We simply are. There is no hell. Proof of God’s existence is still pending, but such faith I have few qualms with.

Susie Salmon’s heaven is more like a high brow country club than a state of transcendence. Us poor mortals. If only we knew. Heaven is just how we pictured it, which is not how I pictured it.

Rollie's review originally appeared at The Daily Nebraskan.

The Lovely Bones Trailer: