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The Lovely Bones, Behind the Scenes with Director/ Co-Writer/Producer Peter No Flesh on Jackson the Lovely Bones

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The Lovely Bones, Behind the Scenes with Director/ Co-Writer/Producer Peter No Flesh on Jackson the Lovely Bones aBOVE: SaoirSe ronan, who StarS aS SuSie Salmon in the lovely bones, behind the SceneS with director/ co-writer/producer peter no flesh on JackSon The Lovely Bones Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel privileges style over substance, writes Brian McFarlane. 46 • Metro Magazine 164 The opening image of Peter Jackson’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 (Susan Sarandon) 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 (Rachel Weisz), 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- 1 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.
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