Tagline: The story of a life and everything that came after…
Curiosity: I still have some residual Peter Jackson loyalty left over from Lord of the Rings. In a rare move, my interest in a film overlapped with my girlfriend’s, as she wants to see as many Oscar-baiting films as she can before the big ceremony March 7 (Stanley Tucci scored a nomination for Actor in a Supporting Role, although I think Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds is more deserving).
Plot: Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is an awkward, artistically inclined 14-year-old
Thoughts: I was on board with Lovely Bones for a while. The performances are solid overall – Ronan is at turns fragile and exuberant, Tucci is pretty got-damn creepy, Mark Wahlberg succeeds in being Wahlberg-y as Mr. Salmon – but little things started to pile up as the film dragged on. I’m a big fan of Rachel Weisz, but I felt like she didn’t get a whole lot to do here. We get a little bit of her family interaction pre-murder – she clearly gets stuck with being the “bad cop” a lot with the kids – but after that she only gets a handful of scenes where she screams at Wahlberg. A lot. It’s just scene after scene of her “going big” before she moves to
Part of the reason Weisz doesn’t get to act more is because of the film’s reliance on narration. There are two things I’m pretty jaded towards: CGI and voice-overs that tell me how to feel. The Lovely Bones is packed with both. Ronan continually dictates what the characters are doing and feeling to the audience, which is fine for a book, but pretty fucking boring for a moving picture. I was also distracted by her “narrator voice” – it’s much deeper and smokier than her normal speaking voice and, given that she never uses in her real life or the afterlife, feels superfluous. And it doesn’t help over-the-top lines about her impending death or the importance of life or other mawkish “what does it all mean?” bits. Combined with Ronan’s general irrelevance to the plot after her death, save for revealing some info about the killer, a decent chunk of the film feels unnecessary and dull. The most special effects-laden scenes are the first ones I would have cut.
Also the film ends like eight times, and each one is pretty unsatisfactory. But if the movie had been edited down to, say, maybe 90-100 minutes, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Tucci’s interactions with Ronan are creepy as eff. Rose McIver brings some much-needed intensity in her attempts to expose Tucci as a murderer. But my favorite scene, as irrelevant as it is to both the plot and the tone, is the comedic montage of Susan Sarandon boozing it up as the drunken grandmother. She ashes her cigarettes into the vacuum cleaner and puts out grease fires with flower pots. With every new Tucci scene, this montage becomes increasingly odd. The Lovely Bones isn’t a comedy, and Sarandon largely disappears save for a few lines after this moment, but it’s still a welcome bit nonetheless.
The last 30-40 minutes are so ridiculously padded that I pretty much ended up hating this movie, but I was on board up to that point.
Reflection: The Lovely Bones takes place like five minutes from my house! That’s not weird at all!
Rachel Weisz had most of her story cut out of the film, that's why her character seemed inconsistent in the movie, she had much more screen time and had more do to in the movie. As for the rest of the film, Mark Wahlberg was miscast and Susan Sarandon overacted too much as the comic relief but that blame goes to the director as well because he cut almost most of the family interaction from the film while he overindulges with the CGI.
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