Fridae

Fingers gently tapping, tapping on the armrest of your plush seat in the cinema, you have to wait for half an hour for the movie’s young protagonist to be abducted and murdered. And then you realise it must have felt that way too for Peter Jackson. It is only through little Suzie’s (Saoirse Ronan) passing that we see what made Jackson pick up this particular film project.

Truth be told, Jackson’s interest in this film seem vested entirely on depicting Suzie’s heaven, which resembles the world of What Dreams May Come. Alternatively, this is what Terry Gilliam might come up with if he became lazy, sold out to big money, and started making timepiece, jewellery, or automobile advertisements. On the other hand, the visuals are so pretty that you wish Jackson would just release The Lovely Bones as a 3D movie. Now, that might be a cinematic experience.

Conceptually, The Lovely Bones has a ground-breaking literary conceit, where murder victims go to My Little Pony heaven, are able to view the real world, narrating events with blessed serenity, and are somehow able to affect and communicate with the living – especially to help them get their murderers. Yet morally, The Lovely Bones wants to teach that death is a great leveller that comes to all, and we have to let go of quaint notions that are so outmoded in heaven, like revenge or justice. And of course, the movie is structured as a sad thriller and murder mystery where people stumble about trying to solve a murder of their loved ones. All these elements are at odds with each other, and one wishes that this movie had a Hirokazu Kore-eda (After Life) to dissect its inherent ironies and absurdities instead of a Peter Jackson doing a straight and faithful adaptation of such flawed material.

It could all be Peter Jackson’s fault – even his grasp of the film’s narrative drive and emotional trajectory is shaky. The constant misfiring of the film rankles, with over dramatic cross-cuttings between scenes that fail to be dramatic (but succeed in being “dramatic” and hokey) and voice-over narrations that are so saccharine and twee (and profound in a dumb blonde way) that they invite laughter.

The Lovely Bones has one saving grace: its half hour or so of fantasy sequences, which I suppose should be good enough to watch it in a cinema.