This is not going to be a favorable review, but in all fairness to The Lovely Bones, I should have known going in that it was not likely to be a movie I would like. I find movies (and books, for that matter) about serial killers purely unpleasant. I have never found a positive aspect to any sense of suspense I get from watching them.
I have not read Alice Sebold’s book, which this movie is based on, but I knew that it was narrated by a teenage girl after her murder. I had hoped that would mean the story would be more about the lives of the people she left behind. Unfortunately, it came as a complete surprise to me when at the end of the movie, the dead girl Susie (Saoirse (pronounced “Jane”) Ronan, very good) explains that the “lovely bones” refers to the relationships that built up between people after her death. It was a surprise because most of the movie deals with Susie’s death, her subsequent exploration of purgatory, and her father’s (Mark Wahlberg) grief-stricken pursuit of the killer. Somewhere in there is a reasonable suspense movie about a psychopath - not a movie I would like, mind you, but a reasonable movie nonetheless. I’m guessing that most of the movie takes place on our mortal coil, but it sure felt like the forays into Susie’s dreamscape between heaven and Earth lasted an eternity. She walks across a meadow, but look! The meadow is actually the ocean! No, wait, it’s a forest! And the leaves on that tree just became birds that flew away! That kind of stuff can get old in a hurry.
Susan Sarandon shows up as Susie’s grandmother to try to hold the family together. She is initially a ridiculously over-the-top incompetent (cooking leads to fires, laundry leads to a roomful of suds, dirt is literally swept under the rug). But, like Susie’s own mother, her story of transformation is not told. There are glimpses of interesting character development with Susie’s little sister, but too little time is spent on her and too much on Susie wandering through the fields of purgatory. Maybe it is normal that the one character I found I could relate to was Susie’s father. And connecting to a man whose daughter has been brutally murdered, as I mentioned up top, is not my favorite movie activity.
“Pronounced Jane”? I don’t get it… What am I missing?
My lame attempt at humor. It’s actually pronounced “seer-sha” or “sur-sha”. For someone ignorant of Irish (that is: me), the spelling bears about as much resemblance to its pronunciation as it does to “Jane”. Maybe?
Ah. Okay. Since I *do* know the rules, it doesn’t faze me.
The key to Gaelic especially and Irish to a lesser degree since they reformed their spelling is: half the letters are there to tell you how the other half are to be pronounced. They themselves are silent. You can pronounce anything once you get that down.
As someone who read the book and saw the movie, I will tell you that the movie (as movies typically do) falls light years short of the written word. It\’s a far better book, and the director completely missed the mark on this one. I will say, it probably still isn\’t a book you would enjoy, but the \
Cindee -
that seems to be the prevailing opinion: the book was far better than the movie.