Lovely Bones

A Sunny Trip Through Death

Peter Jackson can be a very strange film maker. He makes the immense 'Lord of the Rings' Trilogy which set a new bench mark in visionary film making, certainly for fantasy genre films and then turns around and says what he really wanted to do was do a remake of 'King Kong' and does exactly that. A glance over his previous films show that while he is an excellent film maker his strengths are in areas of film that draw on genre fiction. He's good with horror and suspense, and is particularly strong with characterisation when the imagination is involved.

One of his most interesting films to date is 'Heavenly Creatures' which coincidentally introduced a wider audience to the young Kate Winslet. He also produced the recent oddball film 'District 9' which had all the tropes of an American science fiction film, but performed with the vernacular of South Africa.

The man clearly knows what he's doing, so it would be crazy to do a double take on his choices, but it has to be said a movie based on a book set in the 1970s about the victims of serial killers in the afterlife is an oddball choice. You can see what drew him to the project but it's still very strange.

What's Good About It

One of the refrains here on this blog is that I like 1970s period pictures, whether it be 'Frost/Nixon' or 'American Gangster' or 'The Ice Storm'. There's always a hint of a society in upheaval and I am greatly sentimental about the time in history for the promises it held. I was rather disappointed by what followed, but the 1970s for a brief moment showed a glimpse of something that quickly disappeared in the 1980s.

There are lots of good things about this film apart from the period setting. The directing, the acting, the pace, the narrative are all very good. The production design is particularly good. Stanley Tucci is once again a standout. That dude is simply amazing.

What's Bad About It

The casting of Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz doesn't work for me. Neither does Susan Sarandon as the ditzy chain-smoking grandmother. It's not that they're bad, but in this instance the familiarity of their faces kept detracting from the story. Clearly this was an unconventional story so the sense of reality the audience could invest in was finely balanced. The thing that continuously dipped it towards disbelieve were the familiarity of the superstars.

Also, the hair. 1970s hairstyling should be coarse. Long, yes, but men should have coarse hair. Some should even have matty hair. Everybody looked like they showered twice a day using gobs of conditioner and blow-dried their hair, which is so post-New Wave and Duran Duran. I'm probably attuned to this because I recently watched parts of 'Bullit' and the whole of 'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot' and kept thinking wow, the hair on all those people looks so matty and coarse! Aah, the way we were!

What's Interesting About It

Peter Jackson must be the rare man who can make a story about a serial murders of young women by a psychotic serial killer, and turn it into a sunny uplifting move about death and loss. As such, he should be put in the genius category.

Does The Story Even Make Sense?

The story makes sense as some kind of emotional arc dealing with dying if you only knew you were dead, and there was an afterlife to sort it out. It's not quite a ghost movie because she doesn't really affect the outcome of anything, although some characters remain convinced of certain things. The story isn't about how she comes back as a ghost to help the living uncover her murderer. She doesn't come back as a ghost to exact revenge. The whole story that takes place in the in between world after Susie's death actually doesn't really impact on the living, but it's the space from where she narrates the story.

It's such a strange story when you stop to think about it, but you only do so when the whole thing has finished. I'm not sure the story actually is the story it presents itself as, although I'm not sure if that is quite the right take on it.

What's Othello Got To Do With It?

One of the bit references in the film to another film is to Lawrence Olivier's version of Othello. This was made particularly poignant because Susie's first and last love is an Indian boy who signs his love letter as The Moor. It's peculiar because Othello is possibly one of the most vexing of Shakespeare's plays today, and it is compounded in this instance by the blackface Lawrence Olivier putting in a particularly camp performance. I've seen the aid film and it's a morbid kind of torture to sit through.

Still, seeing that race relations get referred to obliquely in the text I have to confess it is one of the better moments in the story, which goes back to the book. It also goes back to something about the 1970s when such crossings were far more feasible on a personal level. I have to say the world has backed off that one significantly since then, while making profuse excuses about backing away.