SUSIE (SAOIRSE RONAN) AND RAY SINGH (REESE RITCHIE) MAKE A DATE SHE CAN'T KEEP

Heaven can wait

Saoirse Ronan (an Oscar nominee for her supporting role in Atonement) is excellent as 14-year-old Susie Salmon, a Pennsylvania schoolgirl murdered by a serial killer in the early Seventies in this inexplicable and overblown adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller. Peter Jackson has drifted a long way from his early study of wild young girls, Heavenly Creatures. He's too addicted to grandiose productions now, from the Rings Trilogy to King Kong, to adopt a style suitable to the delicate details of this story about adolescent longings and family sorrow whose beyond-the-grave narrative blends supernatural thriller and police procedural. A.V. Club writers Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias have suggested the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher, Morvern Caller) ought to have done it. True: working small with a keen understanding of a young person's mindset as Ramsey might have done is clearly what was needed to make something you'd remember out of this material. Instead this elaborate production is all over the place and nothing subtle or distinctive has survived it.

In the novel, the girl is already dead and narrates events before, during, and after the crime from an in-between realm where she's lodged because she's not ready to move on to heaven yet. And here is where big trouble starts. What's mainly just a narrative voice in the book becomes in Jackson's version a distractingly overproduced greeting card location combining Hallmark images with those used as the opening signatures of certain American movie production companies. Susie just needs to linger on till some loose ends get tied up, such as the grief of her parents and the need for her killer to be punished. (In the book he also raped her but the movie chooses to omit that detail. This is a surprising change given that rape is an important part of novelist Sebald's own experience and figures prominently in two of her three novels to date.) Susie also needs to follow around Ray Singh (Reese Ritchie), a boy at school who asked her on a first date the day she was lured to her death. She wants to have that first kiss she missed in life. And Ray, with his teased-out hair and nice jacket, is indeed a real Seventies honey. One way the elaborate production is successful and fun is its Seventies look. There's even something appealingly Seventies about the police investigator as played by The Sopranos' Michael Imperiali.

Stanley Tucci is appropriately creepy, unrecognizable in a wig and unlike any character he's played before as the serial killer George Harvey, who goes unnoticed at first because he's a near neighbor. The other cast members come across as only slightly above TV movie-of-the-week level. Mark Wahlberg is one-note earnest and anguished as the father, Rachel Weisz bland and wasted as the mom, Susan Sarandon briefly amusing but unnecessary as the "quaintly" alcoholic visiting grandmom who comes to "help" when Susie disappears. Sarendon's best sequences are, typically, just a quick but over-dressed collage: the movie gives us a barrage of images to deal with, many of them unnecessary. Even Saoirse Ronan's omnipresent voiceover, for all its conviction, is insufficient to hold things together. Events get so complicated and are run through such a relentless visual blender that the creepiness gets mixed up with the sweetness and it all starts to turn creepy.

Where the movie goes over the top is in its elaborately staged and excessively drawn-out pseudo-Hitchcockian cross-cutting sequences that alternate excruciatingly to the point of exhaustion between one scene and another, starting with a back-and-forth between the vividly sick-making sequence of Harvey luring Susie into his underground lair beneath a cornfield and the sweaty one of her worried family at home having an uneasy dinner. But the editing tricks begin long before that, blending in scenes from past and present, action sequences with flashed-in Instamatic shots by Susie the camera bug, giving us so much more than we need to see and so much less than we need to feel.

The practical problem the screenplay must confront is that we know early on who the killer is, and the only uncertainty is when he'll be detected. Suspense is generated by having Susie's younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) break into Harvey's house, not knowing where he is. Jack (dad Wahlberg) also gets suspicious and confronts the bad guy, another edgy scene. Finally, however, reality seems increasingly not to matter as events get ever more complex and unnatural, ending in a sequence when Harvey and a dump attendant roll a heavy metal safe toward a sink hole, as we watch Ray and a new girlfriend watching them and Susie jumping in and out of the real world from her purgatorial perch. Harvey might have driven up closer to that hole and made moving the safe over to it a whole lot easier and faster, but that would have made the process too brief for the cross-cutting with other locations to work out. All this contrivance, when surely what matters is the anger and sadness, which somehow must take second or third place.

The movie is not unwatchable; it's enlivened by Saoirse Ronan's conviction and depth. Wahlberg works so hard at being a sweet bereaved dad it's endearing at times, even though he's never quite real. But The Lovely Bones is sucked down into its own sink hole when the finale grinds out an unsatisfying end for the villain mixed with Susie's long delayed exit amid choirs of angels and big screen Hallmark. In retrospect this movie is a collage of scenes that could be from many different movies, none good.

In wide release in the US from January 15, 2010.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.