Did 'The Lovely Bones' Need Peter Jackson?

Would you turn down an Academy Award-winning filmmaker? Not only did Peter Jackson win an Oscar for directing The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, he also won an Oscar for adapted screenplay, an honor he shared with Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh. So the prospect of an award-winning team adapting a bestselling, critically-acclaimed 2002 novel by Alice Sebold was very exciting ... until the film opened.

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, which expands today, was greeted with mixed to negative critical reaction when it debuted in limited engagements last month. (Current critical approval at Rotten Tomatoes rests at a mere 36%.) In her review for Cinematical, Elisabeth Rappe expressed her feeling that two directors inhabit Jackson's body, and it's the one that "revels in slapstick and CGI and believes you can never have enough dinosaurs or dwarf jokes" that made The Lovely Bones. She wrote in part: "The film is littered with tonal missteps, outlandish effects, plot holes, thinly drawn characters, and an emotional immaturity that's utterly at odds with the story."

Having seen the film, I agree with the substance of her concerns and criticisms. (We only differ on the details on what we each think worked and really, really didn't fly.) In retrospect, it makes me wonder: did The Lovely Bones need Peter Jackson as much as he needed it?

Jackson wasn't the first director to tackle the project. In 2001, before the novel was even published, Lynne Ramsay was attached to write and direct what was then called Wide, Wide Heaven. Ramsay had already directed Ratcatcher and her next film, Morvern Callar would be released the following year. With those two soul-crunching, biting dramas under her belt, Ramsay might have made a terrific film version of Sebold's book.

Things didn't work out for Ramsay. Jackson and his partners expressed an interest and eventually acquired the rights, deciding to write a spec script and secure studio financing later. With complete creative freedom, the script reflects their vision entirely.

Alice Sebold's novel struck me with thunder. I think it was the writer's delicate yet precise words and the emotional force she accumulates throughout its pages. Narrated by a young teenage girl who has been murdered by a neighbor, able to observe the devastation wrought upon her family yet unable to do anything (directly) about it, the novelty of that arresting first-person perspective -- sad, matter-of-fact, reaching for wisdom -- propels the reader to the end, enlivening what might, in the hands of a lesser writer, prove to be a straightforward crime / family drama.

Comparisons between a book and its film version are inevitable and illuminating; I've spent considerable time thinking about the subject lately, both because of an article I wrote for our sister site SciFi Squad and because of Jackson's film. I decided not to refresh myself on what Sebold had written before seeing The Lovely Bones on the big screen because I wanted to give the film version a fair shake.

As it turns out, Jackson's The Lovely Bones is pretty much what I anticipated from the director of an epic trilogy of plus-sized fantasy flicks and an oversized remake of a classic, lean thriller. Jackson is so in love with the material and the premise that he can't resist expanding upon its themes, conflating them with his own ideas on grief, mortality, and the rich fantasy life of teenage girls. The film veers uneasily between entrancing poetry and wrongheaded melodrama, stopping along the way for left-field slapstick and old school cheap thrills.

Still, I can't help but admire Jackson's audacity. Conceivably, he could have made The Lovely Bones as a spiritual sibling to his own Heavenly Creatures, a delicate, gentle, and modest film about two young women in love with death and each other. Such an approach might even have preserved the strong voice that emerges from Sebold's novel. Instead, the perspective jumps willy-nilly from character to character, perhaps with the goal of building up the tension and playing upon the mystery. What happens is that the thread of the story -- young Susie Salmon's extended spiritual quest -- becomes unraveled. It plays more like a period procedural, a Junior League Zodiac.

The uneven performances don't help; Mark Wahlberg looks like he wandered over from an early audition for Boogie Nights, and Susan Sarandon stomps through like a slightly older version of her earth mother role in Anywhere But Here. Stanley Tucci acts entirely through his eyes, which roll around in his head like a pair of loose marbles. Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, and Michael Imperioli do their best to provide much needed ballast.

What would Lynn Ramsay's version have been like? Or a journeyman filmmaker like Peter Hyams? Either one would have made a far more straightforward picture, one that hewed to more traditional narrative traditions. A non-Jackson version might have been less ambitious, and certainly less costly, but perhaps more satisfying in delivering a coherent adaptation whose subtle truths could still have been apparent and affecting.

As it is, The Lovely Bones provides more of what Jackson has been producing for years. Once again, it's far too much.