Rating: * * *
Verdict: The visuals and lead performances impress but the erratic storytelling can't get to the heart of the book.
Peter Jackson and his partners would have seemed to be a good match for Alice Sebold's best-selling book about young Susie Salmon, a murder victim trying to find solace in her own heaven. After all, Jackson and Fran Walsh had already successfully combined teenage girls and murder in Heavenly Creatures, and his subsequent films have set the standard for big-screen fantasy worlds.
But the book, set in early 70s Pennsylvania, also serves up some challenges for any screen adaptation. It's narrated by Susie from a place that is largely left to the reader's imagination, her voice balancing the shift between celestial and earthly. Also, its contemplation of her murder and her murderer is but one of its storylines alongside a family drama and a story of unrequited love; and it has its own leaps of cosmic logic, among them just how Susie completes the unfinished personal business that has kept her in her own otherworldly transit lounge - a kind of Middle-heaven - before she can graduate to the great beyond.
You can see the film trying hard to juggle those elements into a coherent whole, excising some story strands while unleashing the CGI to depict Susie's afterlife as a vast surreal dreamscape of eye-popping visual metaphors and montages that play like 70s fashion fantasias. But the time spent skipping about on that cosmic plain comes at the expense of the real-world drama of the grieving Salmon family. Her parents Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and Abigail (Weisz) don't quite register as full-blown characters beyond their expressions of despair and Wahlberg seems a bad fit for the paternal role.
The arrival of Susan Sarandon's outlandish Grandma Lynn brings with it an uncomfortable, if entertaining, shift in tone. However, Stanley Tucci's performance as the mild-mannered neighbourhood killer Mr Harvey would seem to justify the expansion of his character's role in the story from the book. He certainly brings an energising menace to those parts of the film which are played out like a standard whodunnit thriller. But exciting as they are, those scenes also contribute to the feeling that this film is curiously out-of-kilter. Or that it's both beholden to the novel but keen to give us the grand tour of Susie's heaven.
If it's erratically engaging as a movie, The Lovely Bones it does have one major saving grace. That's the performance of Saoirse Ronan as Susie, on whose shoulders - or expressive blue eyes and finely modulated voice-overs - so much of this film relies. She's mesmerising, on Earth as in heaven.
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon
Director: Peter Jackson
Rating: M (violence)
Running time: 135mins
