In Theaters: The Lovely Bones

"I remember being small," Susie says, part of the voice-over that only intermittently (as Jackson uses it with a counterintuitive inconsistency) captures the signature tone of Sebold's first person narration -- the balance of naïveté and knowing that make up true precociousness. In a quick set-up we are introduced to Susie as a toddler, her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz). "I was 14 when I was murdered," Susie informs us early on, and the identity of her killer is made plain as well, after a mordant feint about another possible suspect. In these early scenes, Ronan's narration holds the promise of a performance at least reminiscent of that of Linda Manz in Days of Heaven -- a young girl whose reflective powers are both provocatively blunt and finely faceted. Ronan -- whose unsettling performance in Atonement was Oscar-nominated and whose Irish accent is here completely imperceptible beneath her evocative, American everygirl tones -- works wonders with a script that quickly zithers into fatuous, New Age fluff, picking up on all the worst tendencies in Sebold's book. She does pull off the flared yellow cords, though -- nothing to sneeze at in a film that screams rather than suggests 1973, even as it divorces itself from any social or cultural context.

As Susie is narrating the film from the all-seeing beyond, we are given access to both her family and her killer in the aftermath of her death, although we seem to join the latter's psychology even as he begins to fixate on "the Salmon girl." Tucci is given a blond comb-over, fake teeth, and blue contacts, and despite having to shuffle around in pedophile drag (he's literally the guy who stands in the bushes) manages to telegraph the ordinary insidiousness of evil. A cut from his point-of-view inside his suburban home, looking out -- the terrible noise inside one human head somehow almost audible -- to the opposite view, that of a house simply resting peacefully on its foundation, no one visible inside, is chilling. It's one of a few effective moments that Jackson manages, almost despite himself, in a film loaded down with swishy camera moves and slash-happy, Fincher-esque editing, a largely incoherent score from Brian Eno (unless random piano chords played in vague succession is your thing), hyper-acute sound design (every crunch and crinkle is wincingly distinct), big, milky close-ups (especially of Susie and her crush, Ray), and an almost pornographic emotionality, abetted most often by the regrettably sentimental effects.

Susie's family's grief -- the motivating factor for her relegation to heavenly limbo -- is never convincingly portrayed, and the confused message suggested by Jack's obsessive pursuit of Susie's killer (dads, if you just love your daughters enough, they'll help you solve their murders) is one of many of the film's threadbare themes. Most compelling and least effectively explored of these is Susie's rage at having not just girlhood (and the possibility of a first kiss, insularly but accurately weighted with all-importance) but her personhood stolen: "Now I'm the dead girl," she says, "the lost girl, the missing girl -- I'm nothing." It's a binding indictment, for not just her killer but her community have made her so: everyone just wants to move on, forget about it, Susie says later. Suburban enclaves are not made to bear such burdens; she must be diminished so they can go on.

It's a heavy concept lightly and disingenuously brushed over, so that we might plow ponderously ahead, toward several tedious exercises in suspense (in which both Susie's dad and sister realize her killer's identity), a flatly preposterous reunion scene between Susie and her would-be beau, and a truly godawful lunge at epiphanic pathos involving the seeming resurrection of Harvey's many young victims, as though they were not truly destroyed by their ghastly murders. Nice dream; crummy movie.

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