Coca-Cola is having an interesting Oscar season. A can of the stuff makes a cameo in The Road, a serendipitous discovery that turns out to be the most powerful reminder of a better world the film has to offer; in The Lovely Bones, however, the two bottles of Coke shown chilling in a pedophile's underground "clubhouse" are a young heroine's first clue that the world is a worse place than she could have ever imagined. I suppose all attention is good attention for Coca-Cola Co., but I had to wonder what they made of the shot of George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), lowering a bottle to crotch level and popping the cap right in the face of 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan). The moment is crass, overblown and jarringly ineffectual; metaphor as hissing bludgeon. Its suggestion is also the ultimate in anti-product placement and one of the more obvious reminders -- in a film filled with aesthetic bloopers that beg for someone, anyone (even the suits at a global soda-making conglomerate) to step in and do some vetting -- that Peter Jackson answers to nobody.
Autonomy seemingly runs amok in The Lovely Bones, Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's mammoth bestseller. The director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong is now famous for adapting famous texts, but with Bones returns to a realm more akin to the film that garnered not only Oscars and box office bones but a critical reputation: Heavenly Creatures. When Jackson's films are not themselves fantasy worlds, his characters are obsessed with creating them: in Creatures two 14-year-old girls build various worlds of star worship and role-playing, eventually killing the mother who threatens to separate them; in The Lovely Bones key characters are held in thrall by the idea of escape, of creating and being contained by a more perfect world, one they control and which helps them cope.
In Susie Salmon's case the coping gets serious: her perfect place happens to be a personalized version of heaven, which she is consigned to after being murdered by the local psychopath, in a painfully overdone scene which ends with Susie making a bolt for what seems like freedom. True to Sebold's conception of the afterlife as a-religious and yet spiritually redemptive and aesthetically gratifying, Jackson makes death look like the answer to a teen girl's prayers: in a bizarre parallel to the fantasy sequences in Precious, Susie is shown vamping in magazine cover photo shoots and romping to music video beats; her crush's face looms as big as the sea. Existence in this Teen Beat/High Times afterworld is a random, CGI assortment of trees whose leaves blow into birds and fly away and the persistent assertion of consciousness that ties Susie to the world -- the family -- that's not yet ready to let her go.
"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.