Nobody should be surprised that Lord of the Rings auteur Peter Jackson and his famously ingenious Weta Digital team conjured lovely vistas for their film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones.
It’s also not surprising, for anyone who saw Atonement, that precocious actress Saoirse Ronan (pictured) carries the film without visible strain. Starring as 14-year-old narrator/victim Susie Salmon in this high-end ghost story, Ronan effectively communicates the yearnings of a typical high school kid unexpectedly transported to a gorgeously landscaped limbo outside heaven’s gate.
And yet, The Lovely Bones is surprisingly so-so.
The PG-13 thriller, which opens Friday, stumbles on two fronts.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
True to the novel, our heroine is dead from the outset. Through incessant voiceover, she recaps what happens before, during and after the awful deed that snuffed her young life. But the primal crime is already a done deal. So where’s the suspense? At best, catching the bad guy offers dank solace.
Secondly, the characters who are still alive don’t actually get to do much living. Susie’s vengeful father (played by Mark Wahlberg), distracted mother (Rachel Weisz), feisty grandmother (Susan Sarandon) and plucky younger sister (Rose Mclver) muddle through their lives in a suburban cul-de-sac with mourning on their minds. Michael Imperioli’s edgy talents are wasted as an ineffectual cop. Only Stanley Tucci musters a fully dimensional performance as a creepy neighbor camouflaged by a hypernormal facade.
The Lovely Bones might not be so disappointing were it made by a director of middling talents. But even before The Lord of the Rings trilogy established Jackson as a superstar auteur, the New Zealander demonstrated pitch-perfect suspense chops when he directed 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, which also concerned a disturbing crime involving adolescent girls.
But Lovely Bones suggests that Jackson, following his epic translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe, seems to have forgotten how to milk drama from real-life settings.
The script, adapted by Jackson’s Lord of the Rings collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, lacks dramatic tension. Susie strolls through flashbacks of her last few hours on earth during which, grounded by her happy nuclear family, she’s spun into a tizzy by a schoolgirl crush before meeting her creepy fate. Details of the grisly crime are withheld until later.
In the meantime, family members predictably freak out when Susie goes missing. Bad vibes from the weird neighbor (Tucci) ensue amid a police investigation that drags on for months, even as sorrow rips the Salmon family apart: Dad obsesses over the case, mom leaves town, grandma tries to be life-affirming and little sis eventually puts her life on the line following up on a hunch that cracks the case wide open.
Observing all this from the great beyond, Susie gradually figures out that she’s not alone in her victimhood. She quits thirsting for revenge, instead taking care of some unfinished business with the boy of her dreams and searching for peace of mind.
Building lively stories around dead characters is not impossible — witness The Sixth Sense or the dead-man-talking classic Sunset Boulevard.
But making such a movie is tricky. Alternately mawkish and grisly, The Lovely Bones bounces back and forth between Susie’s dreamily surreal limbo and the mundane miseries of life on earth.
Among the survivors, the absence of compelling plot twists and dearth of nuanced character development produces slack doldrums that feel all the more empty when juxtaposed against the digitally generated visions of a ghost girl’s lonely afterlife.
WIRED Limbo looks pretty.
TIRED Ghost story overdoes the voiceover and wastes strong actors.
Rating: 
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