1/2

A version of this review originally ran at Christianity Today Movies. To read the post at its original source, please click here.

I left The Lovely Bones decidedly torn. On the one hand, it was an astonishingly creative and beautiful film, filled with the sort of deeply, deeply imaginative imagery that makes you want to leap from your seat in rapturous applause. But on the other hand, it cannot be denied that the film suffers from a conspicuous case of style over substance. While it is a message film — and a good one at that — the message is not prominent, and the conclusion needlessly timid. But it is something the film has no control over that impairs it the most — a philosophical aversion to bend to the rapacious human appetite for vengeance.

The main character in The Lovely Bones is murdered only minutes into the film. Her name is Susie Salmon (a terrific Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old who lives in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. The year is 1973 and Susie is a typical teenager, especially when it comes to her feelings for a schoolboy with whom she plans on sharing her first kiss. But it is a kiss she is never to have in life. Taking a shortcut through a cornfield after school one day, she encounters her neighbor, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). Harvey, who builds dollhouses for a living, convinces her to enter an underground den that he tells her he’s built for the local kids. But once Harvey has Susie inside, he rapes her, cuts her throat and dismembers her body (though thankfully this horrific event occurs off-screen).

Normally, this would be the end of any normal narrative. How do you continue a story when your protagonist is killed? But as Ghost and other films have shown, sometimes death is only the beginning.

While the Salmon family, led by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, tries to come to grips with their tragic loss, Susie finds herself in her own personal heaven from which she can observe her loved ones but not interact with them. She watches as police detective Len Fenerman’s (Michael Imperioli) case into the crime grows increasingly cold. She watches as her father becomes obsessed with solving her murder at the expense of his relationship with his wife and his own physical well-being. She watches as her sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) comes to suspect George Harvey and goes to perilous lengths to prove his guilt.

Through it all, Susie tries to understand the limbo she comes to call “my heaven,” a surreal place where action in the real world influences her own. Her only guide is a girl calling herself Holly Golightly (Nikki SooHoo), who describes the alternate dimension as an “in-between,” a bit of both heaven and hell. While this bizarre purgatory does not require her to amend for any sins, Susie begins to suspect that she is where she is because there is something she first must do before moving on. Looking back and observing the world she’s left behind is not one of those things, according to Holly, but Susie cannot help but return again and again to her old life. When she discovers that she is not Harvey’s only victim but simply the latest in a long line of victims, Susie decides that hate is the only thing she has left.

Based on the best seller by Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones is drawn from the author’s own experiences when she was brutally raped while a freshman at Syracuse University. Sebold did not attempt to capture the details of her assault in the novel, but rather the emotional and psychological repercussions. I am not sure director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) understands this. He seems less interested in Susie’s emotional trauma (she doesn’t really have one) than her discombobulation with and eventual acceptance of her new surroundings. This has the peculiar sensation of lessening the crime’s impact, no matter how much we want to stay with the pain.

What Jackson is phenomenal at is beautiful, surreal imagery, astounding special effects, and imaginative visuals full of odd angles, close-ups and perspectives. Jackson is superb at capturing the intimate and the expansive, placing cameras into the smallest of places, like a dollhouse looking out on the giants looking in or inside bottles while the rigging of miniature ships is raised within them. While following Susie around in heaven, Jackson evokes a What Dreams May Come aesthetic, crafting an ever-shifting world built on her fantasies and desires, the detritus of a teenage pop culture that manifests itself in psychedelic kitsch and dazzling daydreams. Monsters, so prominent in past Jackson films, still exist, but they take human form now and cavort unnoticed among the innocent back on earth.

Susie’s personal heaven does not resemble an eternal paradise any viewers will recognize. Devoid of identifying religious elements, it has more in common with a generic idea of a blissful, wish fulfillment hereafter than any sort of Judeo-Christian model. There is no God or any supernatural force orchestrating behind the scenes. The afterlife, while “a wide, wide heaven beyond anything we know,” is sweepingly simple, more a reflection of the emotional state of its occupant than anything else. There is an implication that heaven is a place of varying levels and after Susie has completed her tasks in this one, another even more beautiful one awaits.

While it is beautiful (“Of course it’s beautiful. It’s heaven.”), we only come to realize, with Susie, that her heaven is a place where people go to come to terms with what happened to them, nothing more. More specifically, heaven is a place where you come to find a freedom you could not find while on Earth, to let go of the pain of your final moments and the need to see justice done. This is all extraordinarily admirable, especially given the nature of the violence suffered by the lead character and the author who invented her. The message, at its core, is quite simple: forgive and forget…even if, by implication, forgiving means justice is never done.

It is here, where the philosophical rubber meets the cinematic road, that The Lovely Bones (both the novel and the film) fails. Your definition of justice — how it is meted out and to what degree — will determine, in large part, your satisfaction with this film. Some early test audiences revolted at what they saw, so much so that Jackson altered the conclusion. Our final glimpse of Harvey almost seems like a narrative afterthought, an afterthought that, if the film was honest, was not necessary at all, but which was included because its omission was unthinkable. What The Lovely Bones suggests is that even justice takes a back seat to the liberating power of forgiveness. Vengeance, it implies, is best left to, if not God, then “the universe.” But the film tries to have its cake and eat it too. What does it mean when we crave bloody vengeance but call it by the more polite name of justice?

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.