The Lovely Bones

Thefaces of missing children didn’t appear on milk cartons in 1973, the year of The Lovely Bones, and child molestationwasn’t a topic for tabloid television. In those days pedophilia was still thecrime that dared not speak its name; it remained an anxious whisper at theedges of everyday life. But it happened nonetheless. Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel, set in 1973, reflects on the crime from an unusual perspective.Fourteen-year old Susie Salmon is the narrator and victim. She is also dead.

DirectorPeter Jackson is well suited to adapt the novel for the screen if you thinkpast such mammoth spectacles as King Kongand the Tolkien trilogy to recall the film that brought him to Hollywood, Heavenly Creatures. Like The Lovely Bones, Heavenly Creatures was an imaginative mix of grim reality andcolorful fantasy brought to life through animation. Both show a keensensitivity to the emotional world of adolescents, especially girls. And bothinvolved a horrible crime.

Asin the book, the crime at the heart of TheLovely Bones occurs early, and Jackson wisely leaves most of Susie’s rapeand murder to the imagination. In a setting worthy of an especially grim fairytale, the ogre, Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci), lures Susie (Saoirse Ronan) acrossa cornfield on a dying autumn evening and into a lair below the ground, his“clubhouse” he explains. Afterward, she gradually realizes that she is nolonger of this earth but in the “In-Between,” a Technicolor antechamber toheaven whose world of imagination she must cross before reaching the sunnyuplands of forever.

ButSusie isn’t ready for the journey. The curtain between the “In-Between” andmortal life is thin and she can pass into places left behind. She is a restlesssoul pondering the possibility of vengeance, her presence felt as an echo tothose sensitive enough to hear. Jackson has a good feel for constructingsuspenseful scenes and is working from strong material. In this dark moralitytale, the question is how and when justice will visit Mr. Harvey before hecauses more harm.

The Lovely Bones’ ‘70s suburban setting isrecreated in cookie-cutter split-levels set back along winding streets. Thefilm is well costumed and cast. Mark Wahlberg is surprisingly good as Susie’sdad, going unhinged when the terrible finality of her death sets in. Unable tocope with the loss, Susie’s devastated mom is superbly enacted by Rachel Weitz.Susan Sarandon provides comic relief as Susie’s always-tipsy grandmother, a worldlyyet utterly impractical woman who tries to keep the household together aftermom falls apart.

Laughingwith a soulless cackle and trudging along with a stiff gait, Tucci gives Mr.Harvey a skin crawling self-assurance. He is a type visible in many middle-classneighborhoods during those yearsthe awkwardly suspicious, usually single man,sweaty palmed and going about his business furtively. Mr. Harvey sits in hisdarkened house across the street from the Salmons, watching like a nocturnalpredator for another opportunity to kill. The expressive horror on Ronan’s faceis all the acting required for Susie as she gazes across the dimensions at theworld she was forced to exit. Her life was stolen just as it began to bloom;her murder changed many other lives as well.

Jacksoncould have cut a couple of digressions that add nothing but running time to thefilm. Otherwise, he did a fine job coaxing memorable and often movingperformances from his cast and keeping the film largely true to the book.