Heaven is not everything, until you’ve completed what you wished for on earth. In The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a fourteen-year old girl bursting with life and on the verge of her first kiss is murdered and finds herself being invited to that place of everlasting happiness, but she isn’t as yet ready or willing to leave for good.
Adolescent girls who aren’t taken into confidence and showered with extra care by their mothers are at a high risk of naively inflicting permanent mental wounds upon themselves when left alone. For they exist in a sensitive, tumultuous juncture in their lives when someone really special is needed to hold their hands and guide them away from the potential dangers of the human kind.
Ronan is fresh as a bud that’s opening out, and in affairs of the heart is radiant with the rays of vulnerability. Curiousness and gullibility written on her face, she appears completely unprepared to resist the lure of a predator wrapped in smiles. She’s also a picture of fear.
Tucci as an old man who lives alone down the road could easily have passed off as a nice neighbor to know, a gentle senior citizen. But the revelation of the narrator; the odd manner in which the camera introduces his character, following him around without showing his face; and the eerie music that plays in the soundtrack whenever he’s in the picture, lends a sinister look to his face when it is first shown, a few scenes later.
The screenplay neatly incorporates two very different topics, pedophilia and the supernatural; implying the former, and not delving deep into either.
Life on earth could perhaps have been more peaceful if the dead were allowed to directly communicate with the living. For one, it would have solved a lot of mysterious crimes. Instead, the dead is limited to helplessly witnessing the trauma of their loved ones. Parallel cutting between the two worlds is employed frequently to allow the spectator a glimpse of the girl’s perspective.
Peter Jackson’s rapist-murderer—afterlife—family drama leaves you feeling a little sick and wanting to puke. But the film itself is technically fine; the images are suggestive, not gross. Told in the first-person narrative of the dead girl, it also offers an ethereal view from the zone trapped between earth and that imaginary realm where good little girls are forever pretty angels and all things are bliss.
