Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan who needs to shake the curse of poorly adapted novels) is a vibrant 14 year old girl who is just starting to come into herself when she is lured away by her neighbor Mr Harvey (an unusually hairy Stanley Tucci) and brutally murdered. After coming to grips with the fact that she is dead, Susie watches from her Heaven-like place as her family deals with her death and searches for her murderer. Her father (Mark Wahlberg who is looking more and more like Kevin Bacon) tirelessly searches for any lead to find his daughter's killer causing him to lose touch with her mother (Rachel Weisz) who leaves in search of some sort of peace. Her alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon) arrives to take care of her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) and little brother Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale).
For all the faults this movie exhibits, the worst is time management. This is - in true Jackson spirit - a longer than average film. The problem this time is that perhaps half of that time could have been cut without leaving anything out. It takes over half an hour for the main point of the story to even occur, that is, Susie's death. It's another thirty minutes or so before anything really happens in regards to anyone tracking down Harvey or even beginning to suspect him. From reading the description of novel, it seems like the material was there to be a good story, but it just wasn't used very well. One would think that with his experience with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson would know how to respect source material without making many changes, but this is not the case.
Besides the length, even more drawn out by uses of ethereal slow motion, the story just doesn't make a whole lot of sense at times, being meaning-laden images that probably make sense to those who made them. Susie's afterlife world is like something out of Dr. Parnassus's Imaginarium, only more hokey and less inspiring. Also, as she finds her Heaven populated with only Harvey's other victims, one wonders how lonely other heavens must be for non-serial killer victims. Little is explained in way of how or why Susie was killed and we are left to infer that Harvey was a creep of some kind. Duh.
Without giving much away, the ending is one of the less satisfying I have ever seen, and strangest. The only thing we're left with is some kind of sense that Susie is happier now that she's dead, which seems an odd message. The Lovely Bones was apparently a very good book. What we're given here is a movie that changes the pacing, leaves out events, and sucks time down a slow drain with needless scenes. There are some grand ideas and visuals, but none connect.
** (2/5 stars)
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