The Lovely Bones

What may be lovely in pieces and spurts, may not be totally lovely as a whole. This promising film adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel of the same title, The Lovely Bones, is the latest from the Lord of the Rings director. (n.b. Sebold based her novel from her experience as a rape victim, talk about writing close to the heart)

The premise of a Peter Jackson at the helm of a story of girl murdered and raped, watching her family from a graphically created in-between world is juicy at its best. Top this with an awesome cast of Markymark, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon makes it a lot more enticing.

The movie has its technical greats, the camerawork is outstanding, the editing lets the transition of the story move better, and the graphics are superb that it makes you want to die right away and be in that marvelous place. With all these positives, still I had a feeling that something was missing. The story seemed to imply that Susie (the murdered girl) was happy to be dead (!?). In fact the hilarious part was showcased towards the end when she took hold of her schoolmate to make out with her long time crush.

The Lovely Bones, apart from not being able to fully concentrate on the difficulties of the family to cope (or not) with the loss of their murdered child, also fails to showcase how the mother and father fell apart in the wake of her loss. The mother was shown as someone who just did not want to deal with the loss of her child and just tries to shut herself from the reality. The father was a typical obsessed man who could not believe that he could not take care of his family. All these with no processing, or reason, and just left it as it is for the viewer to accept. It tries too hard or little in showing us how grief can engulf and consume a lovely family, which was what I was expecting at the very least. It was getting there when Markymark was breaking the boats in bottles one by one, and yet falters when it takes the turn of suspense thriller.

The movie all in all fails for me, mainly due to great expectations. The computer graphics are awesome and a visual feast (talk about humongous boats within bottles crashing at the shoreline while an orange sky turns dark blue) . The cast is solid with special mention to Stanley Tucci (who deserves an Oscar nomination to say the least) who played the killer as effectively as a low keyed Hannibal Lecter. And the main protagonist, Susie gives her best to render us her sense of grief, relief, anger and all the mixed emotions that a dead person watching over her family can behold.

The Lovely Bones is still lovely in some parts but as a whole is, as Susie says, "almost, but not quite."