Movie 56: The Lovely Bones

Susie Salmon is a young teenage girl, just discovering love and taking a bunch of pictures. Life is pretty good. Then the local peado murderer takes a shine to her, lures her in to his hand made bunker in a field, rapes and murders her, chops up the body and shoves it in a safe. But Susie isn’t all the way gone, she’s in the inbetween. Unable to move on to heaven she watches over her family as they start putting the pieces together.

At least that’s what it tried to be. Alas, they failed. That’s kind of the tagline for this movie, lacking.

Sure the producers wouldn’t use it but it’s true. It has some good points to it. The scenes in the inbetween (that name comes from Susie’s little brother but fuck knows where he heard it) are Terry Gillium trippy. It’s all morphing scenes, suddenly changing situations and seems to match Susie’s mood. It looks pretty good, though a little like that Robin Williams movie….um…whatchamackalit. What Dreams May Come.

Stanley Tucci places the weird peado guy rather well. Rachel Weisz is fantastic as a grieving mother, though I love her quite a lot so that probably contributed. Susan Sarandon is a fantastic drunken, pill popping, chain smoking grandma. And Saoirse Ronan gives a very good performance as Susie. Plus, her sister is played by an actress called Rose McIver. No relation as she’s missing an a from my surname, but nice to see people with my clan name getting work.

There’s also a 5-10 minute, maybe not that long, sequence going through all of Stan the man’s victims that’s extremely well done. If that was just a short film by itself with none of the surrounding material it would be great.

That’s the good.

The bad pretty much outweighs it. This film is disjointed and padded all to hell. Susie randomly trips about in the inbetween for quite a while. Her dad and her brother say they’ve seen her, but no explanation is given (she touches a girl earlier in the movie who barely appears for the rest, and its explained that they are now joined). The suspicions that the dad and sister have towards Stanley Tucci don’t make much sense besides the fact that he lives alone and is a tiny bit creepy. And the young love story is movie nonsense.

Also, have any of you ever watched The Forgotten? It’s a TV show with Christian Slater about a network of people that try and find out who John or Jane Doe’s are so the families can have some closure. It’s pretty good except for one aspect. There is a hugely melodramatic device used in every episode with the victim talking about themselves and their hopes and dreams before they were brutally murdered. Without it it would be a very good show. The Lovely Bones feels like a film version of that, as Susie does a lot of melodramatic blabbing.

AND the title makes fuck all sense, even with the explanation given it’s a shite title.

Could have been good, but it’s too long, too disjointed and the script is a bit arse. Your still on the good side of the scales for me though Mr Jackson, everyone makes mistakes. Looked good though so you did your job kinda.