The Lovely Bones

City Paper Grade: C+

by Sam Adams

GHOST GIRL: Peter Jackson's wisest decision was casting Saoirse Ronan.

[ City Paper Grade: C+ ]

Do movies have lives of their own? If so, then the ghost of Lynne Ramsay's The Lovely Bones is looking down from movie heaven, shaking its head and sighing ruefully. Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar) never got her attempt to adapt Alice Sebold's 2002 Norristown-set novel, which is narrated by the ghost of a raped and murdered girl, off the ground, which left Peter Jackson to step into the breach. Any change of pace from Jackson's woefully overstuffed King Kong is a welcome one, but Jackson, and his collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, seem to have forgotten how to tell stories on a human level.

The movie might have been directed by Kong himself, looking down from a great height and approaching his subject with hands that crush when they mean to caress. Jackson's wisest decision was casting Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) as Susie Salmon, the high-spirited girl who falls prey to Stanley Tucci's neighborhood psychopath. Even in the scenes before she has met her fate, Ronan's eyes seem to hold a premonition of what is to come, as if she were haunted by her own ghost.

She shows better judgment, in fact, than most of the film's grown-up actors, who Jackson pushes to the edge of caricature — and, in the case of Susan Sarandon's chain-smoking grandma, substantially beyond. Mark Wahlberg's puppy-dog eyes can't convey the soul-destroying grief of a bereaved father, and Tucci stops just short of flicking his tongue in and out like a hungry snake.

The worst offender, though, is Jackson himself, who renders Susie's postmortem habitat as a luminous CGI monstrosity, a gauzy paradise of wafting winds and verdant fields. It's as if he's spent too much time in the clouds and can't bear to come back to earth. The result is an afterlife with the transcendent power of calendar art, a motel-room portrait of the world to come.