“The Lovely Bones”: flawed, but gorgeous

“My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered on December 16th, 1973. I wasn’t gone. I was alive in my own perfect world. But in my heart, I knew it wasn’t perfect. My murderer still haunted me. My father had the pieces, but he couldn’t make them fit. I waited for justice, but justice didn’t come.”

Ok, close your eyes. Got them shut. Good. Replay that quote in your head. Now remember Lynn Ramsey, you know the great director of “Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar?” You do? Wonderful. Now imagine she directed the film adaptation of “The Lovely Bones.” Some film that’d be, right? Up there with Alex’s Cox’s version of “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” and Richard Stanley’s “The Island of Dr Moreau.” The un-filmable novel filmed. Your favourite book shot just the way you wanted it. Genius.

Well, get over it. Like those other films, it never happened. Big bad Peter Jackson and his cronies got their grubby mitts over Alice Sebold’s novel and *shock horror*… you know what? It ain’t half bad. The uber-film buff in you can be satisfied that you lorded it over the mere movie mortals for a second, but let’s deal with the film with got rather than the one that was never made.

Our dead narrator Susie is friendly, awkward and talented; she longs to become a photographer, attends her school film club (where she hates Lawrence Olivier’s “Othello”) and dreams about her first kiss with the new boy in her school, Ray. Jackson deliberately smears the camera with extra sugar, giving Susie’s life a “Brady Bunch”-like quality, not perfect, but damn near as close as a teenage girl is likely to get

This is a slice of middle class heaven Americana style. The house is full of books and the parents full of love. Even the Salmons’ boozy Grandmother is just a lush rather than a drunk. And when her brother Buckley chokes on a twig, Susie saves the day by doing a Steve McQueen in her dad’s Mustang, racing to the hospital. That and wearing her mum’s knitted hats are as bad as it gets for the Salmon family. As Susie says, “We weren’t those people, those unlucky people who bad things happen to them.”

Until that is, Susie is raped and murdered.

Like the killing of Duncan in Macbeth, Jackson has the good sense never to show Susie’s wicked demise at the hands of her neighbour, Mr. Harvey. He doesn’t need to. We can privately construct the details from the countless movies and news stories that depict such atrocities.

Jackson knows that our lucidly gruesome conclusions will far outweigh anything committed permanently to film. What he does do effectively is scatter the pieces of that unpleasant jigsaw all over the floor of our minds, ready for us to put them together again.

Her murderer, Mr. Harvey, is single, smart and good with the neighbourhood kids. The warning signs are there from the start, but this is an America still naïve to the signals that make us so quick to judge loners as killers and paedophiles. Harvey has all the symptoms: the OCD house, the well-equipped cellar, the odd profession (he makes doll houses) and the single light left burning at night when the innocent amongst are tucked up safely in bed.

The very fact that Jackson makes Harvey so obvious increases our fear for Susie, even though we already know she’s dead. Why would the Salmons flag a serial killer in the first place? John Wayne Gacy Jnr and Ted Bundy are still far from household names in 1973; in fact, both were just embarking on their bloody careers. The American media’s rabid obsession with them had still yet to explode, so Harvey can act like the rabbit of the same name and remain invisible.

Perhaps that why the excellent Stanley Tucci gives Harvey a Jimmy Stewart voice. Who doesn’t love Jimmy Stewart? After all, President Truman said of the actor, “If Bess and I had a son, we’d want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart.”

When Harvey leads a bright girl like Susie to such an obvious death, we buy her stupidity. Jackson’s ultra-clean close ups of her sudden realisation of the danger she is in are all the more heart-breaking. At the point of her death, Susie can hear and see everything with breathtaking clarity, the nodding dog, the coke bottles, the china figurines, and Harvey’s madness.

But it’s too late.

She’s smart enough to spot an outdated movie cliché like Olivier’s “Othello,” but she isn’t smart enough to spot a cliché that hasn’t been invented yet. Jackson cross cuts between Susie’s last moments on earth with the Salmons’ last normal family meal. The plates seem to crash against each other as the food is served, cutlery clatters at increased decibels and Susie’s father (Mark Whalberg in “Three Kings” earnest mode) jokes about piling up her plate with extra beans. It’s an unnerving mix.

As we know, death isn’t the end for Susie. She escapes via clouds of dry ice into her own personal heaven, one that changes with her moods and the feelings of her loved ones left grieving back on Earth. Jackson’s earlier works, “Heavenly Creatures,” “The Frighteners” and “The Lord of the Rings” all featured versions of an afterlife, but “The Lovely Bones” joins that small sub genre of CGI surrealism that includes “The Cell,” “The Fall,” “What Dreams May Come” and “Tideland.”

Such movies are generally poorly received, but Jackson grounds his stunning visuals in the films’ emotional reality. At times, Susie’s paradise does threaten to become yet another advert for the New Zealand tourist board and we start to think that if being dead is so much fun what’s the point of living in the first place? Surely sliding down immense glaciers for eternity is preferable to doing homework?

Nevertheless, it’s no fun watching your family come apart at the seams as they struggle to come to terms with their grief. It’s no fun observing your dad peering at his own reflection everyday, seeing his dead daughter looking back at him. It’s no fun realising that as a parent you would see a dead child whenever you wake, as they were once part of yourself. It’s no fun spying on your would-be first boyfriend fall in love with another girl. And it’s definitely no fun knowing your killer is still living under the noses of your family.

Susie’s sense of injustice and her unwillingness to leave her family lead the film into an undead Nancy Drew adventure. From beyond, she fuels her dad’s obsession into finding her alive or finding her killer. His drive stems from his hobbies. “Hobbies are healthy, they teach you things” he tells Susie when they make ships in a bottle together. “They teach you to see things through.” In fact, he’s a mirror image of Mr. Harvey, who is equally dogmatic in his own terrifying extracurricular activities.

The final section of “The Lovely Bones” showcases Jackson’s talent for suspense as Susie’s younger sister Lindsey takes centre stage, moving from beneath the shadow of her sibling. “My little sister had run ahead of me,” Susie proudly announces as Lindsey not only grows up but takes the fight to Harvey in a nerve shredding sequence reminiscent of “Night of the Hunter.”

Lindsey’s maturing to young adulthood marks the healing process for Susie and her family. “Nobody notices us when we leave,” remarks Susie as she finally gives up her day glow heaven to the spine tingling vocals of This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren”: “On the floating, shipless, oceans, I did all my best to smile.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t have the tear jerking reaction it should, because David Lynch already used it to shattering effect in his devious “Lost Highway” over a decade ago.

Again, it’s tempting to contemplate what Lynch would have made of the story, but we kind of already know when we view his underrated masterpiece, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” Still, Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” is a magical work of art, boasting one of the greatest soundtracks of modern times by the legendary Brian Eno. Jumbled, uneven, manipulative, but ten years down the line it will be reappraised as a work of flawed genius:

“In 1973 I was murdered. I was here for a moment and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.”