aBOVE: , who stars as Susie Salmon in , behind the scenes with director/ co-writer/producer Peter no flesh on Jackson The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of ’s novel privileges style over substance, writes Brian McFarlane.

46 • Metro Magazine 164 The opening image of ’s film In the hours after I was murdered, as ‘What can possibly happen?’ The answers adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2009) my mother made phone calls and my are ‘She does’ and ‘A great deal’. is that of a penguin in one of those glass father began going door to door in the snow domes. As the voice-over spells neighbourhood looking for me, Mr Harvey Even before I came to the novel’s fleeting out, what you get before you shake it is ‘a [the murderer] had collapsed the hole in the reference to Thornton Wilder’s play Our nice life – trapped in a perfect world’. On- cornfield [the murder site] and carried away Town, I’d thought to myself that not since screen, a little girl is playing with a top as a sack filled with my body parts. that beautiful paean to ordinary life had I her father reads. A few brief shots later, she come across this representation of a dead is a teenager with a camera, ‘capturing a And nearly a year after: ‘By late summer person’s view of what the living are up moment’, and a few further moments later 1974, there had been no movement on to. Susie, often (and wittily) through her we hear her repeat something her Grandma my case. No body. No killer. Nothing.’ dealings with Franny, her ‘intake counsellor Lynn () has said, ‘We were This first-person commentary is hugely [sic]’, raises issues about life and death, not those unlucky people to whom bad important for establishing tone of voice; about how the living cope with death (for a things happen,’ to which she adds, ‘As Sebold is clearly aware that a plain, almost terrible moment I thought Franny might tell usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.’ In other prosaic articulation reinforces the horrific her to ‘move on’, but the novel is far too words, these opening words and images smart for such crappy advice): have been setting the film (and us) up for the utter dislocation of what has seemed ‘When the dead are done with the living,’ permanent. Perhaps the shot of a fridge Franny said to me, ‘the living can go on to being tipped into a rubbish pit should have other things.’ been seen as a warning, as the voice- ‘What about the dead?’ I asked. ‘Where do over hints, about ‘the way the earth could we go?’ swallow things up’. She wouldn’t answer me.

Up to a point, this is the concern of both This is not a book that suggests that being the film and Alice Sebold’s highly regarded dead is as much fun as living. It is astute 2002 novel: the rupture of the seemingly about how people deal differently with a secure by an act of arbitrary dreadfulness. death in their midst. If it is not merely a In both, the Salmon family is riven by the gloomy tract, and it is not, that is because disappearance of its eldest child, Susie. of Susie’s measured appraisal of facts as In the novel’s opening lines, she tells she sees them, and then what she makes the reader, ‘I was fourteen when I was of those facts. murdered on December 6, 1973,’ and in the film, Susie’s voice-over informs the viewer When my father’s car pulled into the drive, in the same words, just after her reference event and the strangeness of the situation, I was beginning to wonder if this had been to Grandma’s chronic wrongness. Most of and the consistency of the dead girl’s point what I’d been waiting for, for my family to the key events of the novel are transposed of view is crucial to how we receive the come home, not to me any more but to one to the film and it ends on the same note, narrative of what goes on between heaven another with me gone. with Susie’s blessing from heaven, ‘I wish and earth. Intermittent voice-over is no you all a long and happy life.’ So why equivalent for the kind of focus, for the And this is a far more moving aperçu than do the film and the novel feel so utterly emotional shading, that colours everything anything the film comes up with. different from each other, even allowing we know in the novel. for, as one always must, the move from the I’ve taken more time than I usually would words-on-a-page semiotic system to one We come to value those perceptions that in writing about the novel. I’ve done so not of moving images and sound? I am not one work sometimes to summarise, sometimes because the film is ‘different’ – of course of those people who inevitably finds the to predict, sometimes to just reflect on her it is – but because it is so immeasurably film version of a famous novel inferior, but experiences in both ‘places’. inferior as a work of narrative art, because in this case I couldn’t help but wonder why it has taken off from the novel’s starting- the novel seemed so satisfying and subtle I could not have what I wanted most: point and done such heavy-handed things and the film so not. Mr Harvey dead and me living. Heaven with it. Voice-over Susie talks of ‘capturing wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that a moment’; this is not Jackson’s way of There is something shocking in the very if I watched closely, and desired, I might going about things. It’s as if he’s hardly reg- matter-of-factness of the novel’s tone. Not change the lives of those I loved on earth. istered for long enough what any moment just in the appalling opening sentences, might have to offer. I suppose I should but in the almost casual way Susie reflects In an early comment like this one, Sebold on developments, or lack of them, in the sets up narrative expectations – along matter of finding her murderer. with niggles like ‘Can she keep it up?’ and above: susie

Metro Magazine 164 • 47 which he entices Susie, and her unsuspect- ing family home where her mother, Abigail (), is preparing dinner. There is real tension in the scene in Harvey’s hide- out in the moments leading up to the mon- strous rape and murder, filmed, it should be said, with proper restraint and followed by a strange grey-blue glow that is Jackson’s way of rendering Susie’s having died and of her being in the process of removal to another element.

So far, so good. But from here on, the film dissolves into a series of tedious visual decisions that Jackson characteristically settles in the most flamboyant ways possi- ble and with scant regard for any com-

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come clean at this point: Jackson does not make films for me. I can’t stand the Lord of the Rings trilogy in all its pretentious blockbusting showiness. It’s not that I’m a soured-off aficionado of Tolkien’s trilogy – I’m not a fan at all – it’s just the non-stop floridness of Jackson’s cinematic imagina- tion that I find so wearisome. He can’t bear to linger: his filming style is the cinematic equivalent of shouting hysterically, of con- stantly setting out to shock the viewer with some new image, to take the breath away with some flamboyant coup d’editing, so that one mightn’t notice the absence of 2 a mind at work. In The Lovely Bones this flashy style tends to render the film, at key which sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) is struck points, just vapid and silly. by a display of dollhouses (Mr Harvey’s plexity of meaning. In bursts of rhetorical work?), and Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), visual flourish, he depicts heaven as, say, All right, Jackson is not making his film for the Anglo-Indian student Susie fancies, a sunlit hillside topped with a decorative me, so what, objectively, does it offer? Well, appears and we hear Grandma’s verdict – tree, or as a gazebo from which Susie and for about the first forty-five to fifty minutes ‘He’s cute’ – and her advice to Susie, ‘Just heavenly sister (to invoke the last Jackson of its (over)length, I was sufficiently held. have fun, kid.’ film I’ve admired) Holly (Nikki SooHoo) The first crack in the ‘perfect world’ sym- exchange views on whether they are meant bolised by the snow dome appears when What is happening – and it grabs the atten- to be looking back (vengeance) or forward Susie’s little brother, Buckley (Christian tion firmly enough – is the establishment of (reconciliation of the dead with the living). Thomas Ashdale), is on the brink of death an ordinary family to whom the odd crisis ‘You have to leave. You have to let go,’ after swallowing a twig, and Susie (Saoirse occurs as it might to any. Then comes the says Holly. Elsewhere in heaven they are Ronan) grabs her father’s car keys and undermining idea that the neighbourhood found in a sort of topiarist’s paradise, with races him to the hospital. This is executed is no longer the safe haven, the ‘perfect green sphere and shrubs shaped as ani- with some very adroitly managed, rapid-fire world’. Susie’s voice tells us: ‘A man in mals. The visual style is so over-elaborate cutting, and the ensuing car chase to the my neighbourhood was watching me,’ that it obscures what might be significant hospital is brilliantly filmed. All this is part of and, a little later, ‘My murderer was a man matters of life and death. Of course there a sort of prologue to the statement of the from our neighbourhood.’ Provocatively, are moments when the physical aspects opening sentence of the novel intoned on the film then cuts between Mr Harvey of the filming work, as when Susie traces the soundtrack by the dead Susie. There is () at work on his dollhouses the murders ‘in a room under the earth’, a brightly lit sequence in a shopping mall in and Susie’s father, Jack (), but this is vitiated by the sentimentality of at his hobby of making mini ship models the golden glow in which she is later united to fit in bottles. Is the film hinting at some with Harvey’s other victims in a heavenly sort of dark alter-ego idea here? There are field. It’s almost as though we are meant further unsettling cuts between Harvey’s to see death (even if preceded by rape 1: Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) and susie underground warren in the cornfield, into and murder) as somehow OK if you only 2: Abigail Salmon (Rachel Weisz)

48 • Metro Magazine 164 give yourself over to the compensations do so, the film just doesn’t work. As a persuasive as a likeably ordinary father who of heaven. If heaven is really anything like contrast, consider how Jane Campion’s proves capable of obsession; Weisz is given what Jackson suggests, I’m simply not Bright Star (2009) again and again makes too little to enable us fully to grasp Abigail’s going. visual representation create delicate and ambivalences; Tucci understands, or at least exquisite effects to invoke the beauty of makes us understand, the vileness beneath It is not just the hysterical visual style that Keats’ poetic diction – not to ‘illustrate’ it his deceptively mundane exterior; and Susan makes the film’s 135 minutes such a taxing but to take advantage of the film medium Sarandon (her first grandmother role) offers experience. The utter loss of any coherent to create a poetry as vivid and evocative welcome relief whenever, cigarette and point of view – and Susie’s occasional in its own right. The measure of Jackson’s drink at the ready, she appears. This is an commentary cannot provide this – reduces failure is not that he has been ‘unfaithful’ actor’s film, but a director with an uncertain the film to a series of arbitrary episodes. to Sebold’s original vision but that he has aesthetic sense and intellectual grasp has When Abigail leaves home and fetches allowed stylistics to obscure anything like been given his head. As I said, Jackson up in a Californian vineyard, there is no serious meaning. Every now and then the doesn’t make films with me in mind, but adequate sense of what has provoked this film lapses into conventional storytelling even his Lord of the Rings fans are likely to departure. Sebold led into this via a clear habits – in, for instance, some of the police be unenthusiastic about his latest. distinction between how she and Jack procedures or in the plucky-girl-in-danger have coped with the rupture of their family episode when Susie’s sister Lindsey breaks Brian McFarlane is adjunct associate life, and there is vestigial but palpable into Harvey’s house – and one is grateful professor at Monash University, Melbourne. sexual attraction between Abigail and the for the respite from the St Vitus’ dance His most recent book is The British ‘B’ Movie, investigating cop, Len Fenerman (Michael assault of editing and bravura effects. co-authored with Steve Chibnall for Palgrave/ Imperioli). The film doesn’t make nearly Macmillan, London. • potent enough her sense of how Susie’s None of this is the fault of the actors, who death has affected her. admirably do all they can with their wispily written roles. Saoirse Ronan as Susie is both But essentially Jackson can’t make visual ordinary and extraordinary: she could cope pyrotechnics achieve what Sebold’s words believably with the full burden of Susie as do, and because he seems to want to Sebold envisaged her; Wahlberg is equally

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