The Lovely Bones

Roll up roll up, come one and all to see 'The Lovely Bones'; have your preconceptions confirmed and stereotypes re-enforced, your fears eased and your demons exorcised. That's right ladies and gentlemen, Peter Jackson directs the film adaptation of the well-known book in which a young innocent girl - Susie Salmon - is murdered but lives on in the 'in-between' before going to heaven. While there she experiences wondrous light and colours and has an ethereal presence on earth - in which her bereaved father finds comfort.

This is a story that's all about finding catharsis after a loss. Susie's parents experience the numbing terror of her going missing, then the inevitable dawning that she's never coming home. Murdered before she had the chance to experience so much of life, the pain is felt much more keenly by them as her father (Mark Walberg) obsessively hunts through newspaper clippings looking for suspects in her murder. There's nothing wrong with a story that tries to make sense of senseless acts and to comfort people who have suffered a loss I cannot contemplate. Anything that helps someone impacted by such tragedy is probably a worthwhile thing. But if you look at 'The Lovely Bones' more closely I think it comes across as a rose-tinted picture of loss in a world that's hopelessly unrealistic - and so ultimately fails in what it wants to do.

The film is littered with stereotypes (observe the paedophile killer who looks exactly as the Daily Mail would have us believe, the suburban family with 2.4 children, the sweet innocent girl looking for her first kiss with a mysteriously exotic older boy) which do nothing help the world of the film feel like the real world. If you want to write a story that's trying to help people with loss, I don't see how it's possible to litter your story with unrealistically shiny-happy ideas and still be taken seriously. Of course it would be great if everyone we knew who ever died in fact lived on in a technicoloured fantasy land where they could look over their loved ones; but this film gives me no reason to think that anything it's telling me could ever be true.

Added to this, 'The Lovely Bones' has one of the weakest denouements I’ve seen for some time, as Susie has one last chance to interact with the world before going on to heaven she can either choose revenge or love. She chooses love and everything's all cuddly and warm. But then the baddie gets his comeuppance anyway in a scene that looks like it was added after test screenings (although I am informed this is in the book). It's an ending that had me making a face of confusion at my television and even more bemused about why I should take the film seriously.

It's actually a film that looks pretty good and is very well-acted. The depiction of 'the in-between' is bright, full of colourful and a joy to watch; also I was happy to see Michael Imperioli in something that doesn't cast him as a Mafioso. But all that can't save 'The Lovely Bones' from its own rose-tinted view of death and loss. A big disappointment.