The Lovely Bones (Tuesday, December 15, 2009) (195)

One of my most significant and important movie memories was in the fall of 1998, when I went to see the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come. I remember it mostly because it was the first time I watched a movie and realized before it was over that it was a piece of garbage. Up until that point I had passively watched movies and not really thought about whether they were good or not - but this one jumped out at me as being particularly bad.

As I watched The Lovely Bones recently, all I could think about was how much it reminded me visually and viscerally of What Dreams May Come. Director Peter Jackson uses similar CGI elements that are so contrived and Thomas Kinkaid-esque that they have no depth to speak of and are simply alienating. It also has a somewhat similar, boring story - one that never really connects to anything I care about and never really comes to a sensible conclusion.

Based on the 2002 Alice Sebold best-selling book, the story is simple, if rather foggy. The film is narrated by Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who tells us in the opening scene that she has was killed in 1973. We see a brief lead-up to how this happened and then a truncated version of the murder itself. Then we see her parents and police in her Pensylvania town look for the murderer.

Through the film, Susie exists in a middle zone between heaven and earth, but it is never clear why she is there. There are elaborate visual sequences showing her discovering this fantasy world where she can be on a sunny beach and look at snowy mountains ten steps away. For reasons that are never clear, she cannot move up to heaven and must stay in this dreamy limbo place.

Unlike the movie Ghost, say, it is not that she's waiting for her murderer to be discovered before she can move along. She seems to just be hanging out - and even she seems to not know where to go or what she's doing there. We also see the lives of her family (especially her father and younger sister) being turned upside-down by the pain they feel at her loss.

I think one of my biggest problems with this story is that there seems to be a beginning, and then there is what appears to be an end - but by the time we get there, it is not totally clear where we are or what we have just seen taking place. I can be sure that I've seen some action and some dialogue, but I don't know how it all connects or why I am supposed to care.

The script is terrible (maybe the book is too - but I haven't read it). Not only is the structure messy, but the dialogue is ridiculous. To make matters worse, the inclusion of a narrator is one of the most unnecessary elements I've ever seen. She tells us almost exactly what we are seeing on screen - so if she wasn't there telling us what we were seeing, we could understand it well just the same. I

n addition, Susan Sarandon, playing Susie's grandmother, comes in at one point after her death, when her parents think they need help keeping the house and looking after her siblings. It is never clear, though why she is there, as neither one of the parent's seems that busy or distracted that they can't keep doing their duties. There's a terrible comic relief sequence of Sarandon vacuuming and sleeping while drunk and smoking cigarettes. It's feels out of place and rather inappropriate tonally. For the most part, Jackson seems to put style over substance concentrating on lavish computer-animated settings in the middle-world and pretending that helps advance the narrative (which it does not do). These sequences are indulgent and pointless.

Throughout the film the acting is pretty terrible. Mark Wahlberg (who I normally like) is much too earnest and feels much more like Dirk Diggler playing Brock Landers in Angels Live in My Town (from Boogie Nights) than a concerned dad. Rachel Weisz doesn't seem to react in any particularly strong way. She gets very sad and then upset with her husband for getting obsessed with finding the killer, then leaves the house to go to California for rest and relaxation. She's not much of an emotional part of the story - and basically as unnecessary as Sarandon.

The worst thing about the acting is that Jackson, a Kiwi, has a ton of non-Americans cast in small roles. Almost every single one of them struggles with their American accent at some point. This is terrible and something that could be easily fixed (I think) in post-production (with ADR dubbing). Stanley Tucci, who plays the creepy neighbor murderer (I'm not giving anything away - this is explained early in the film and in the trailer), has a bizarre creepy affect. Why he couldn't just speak normally is totally a mystery to me. Not only does he have to look and behave like a freak, but he hast to talk like one too. If Jackson is so deaf to American accents, he should not be making movies set here (he can stick to movies in Elvish instead).

After finishing the film, I had to think for awhile to figure out what I had just seen because it basically didn't make sense. Aside from being incredibly boring and much too long (it runs 135 minutes), I don't think much really happened beyond from the initial 'girl-is-murdered-in-a-cornfield' set-up. There is no story arc and no important character development. The direction is horrible and script is choppy and minor-league. The look of the animated parts is terrible, over-done and more nauseating than paradisaical. Overall this is a failure of a movie.

Stars: 0 of 4