Life After Death
by Julia M. Klein
JANUARY 14, 2010 TAGS:
The distinctive cosmology of Alice Sebold’s best-selling 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, takes its inspiration from a surprising source: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Like Wilder, Sebold locates the action in the recent past (in her case, the 1970s) and focuses on an ordinary community disrupted by tragedy. And she adopts the conceit that the dead somehow retain both consciousness and the ability to return, within limits, to the land of the living. Sebold telegraphs her literary debt with a visual reference — to the “old-time street lamps” that Susie Salmon, her protagonist, remembers from a production of the classic play.
Wilder violated realist conventions by having his Stage Manager deliberately manipulate time and space in a rural New Hampshire town. Sebold launches The Lovely Bones with an even more unconventional jolt, by revealing that her narrator is a murdered 14-year-old. Looking down from her personal heaven, Susie Salmon, an aspiring photographer, remembers her brief, happy life at school and home in snapshot moments. At the same time, she observes and haunts her grieving family and friends, as well as the not-so-kindly neighborhood sociopath who lured her to her death.
Set in the humdrum precincts of the Philadelphia suburbs, where schoolchildren bully and flirt and fall in love, the book is smart and achingly tender in its depiction of the various ways that grief can manifest itself, from denial and flight to obsession and the desire for revenge. Some readers may struggle with the novel’s fantastical elements, but, on a metaphorical level, Susie’s continuing presence in the lives of those who loved her makes deep emotional sense.
But film often forces us to take the metaphorical literally. And that’s where the problems of the current cinematic adaptation of The Lovely Bones begin. Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning writer-producer-director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has sacrificed much of the book’s delicate emotionality in favor of the clichés of horror-fantasy. While Jackson’s direction hypes the book’s suspense, the screenplay, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson, omits some of the novel’s more sexually disturbing elements, from Susie’s rape to her mother’s affair with a homicide detective to Susie’s supernatural sexual consummation with the Indian boy she loved. (The PG-13 movie gives us just a final kiss.)
Instead of portraying the complex lineaments of grief, Jackson pairs standard horror-film tropes with flamboyant surrealism. His tool box includes numerous wide-angle shots, rapid cuts, and eerie close-ups of menacing faces and objects. Unremarkable suburban houses turn out to be haunted, while ominous music and gestures foreshadow every twist. At one point, Susie’s killer, George Harvey (a sublimely creepy, almost unrecognizable Stanley Tucci), and homicide detective Len Fenerman (The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli, cast against type) stare at each other through the windows of one of Mr. Harvey’s elaborately crafted dollhouses — an off-kilter encounter that leads precisely nowhere.
Juxtaposed with intimations of earthly mayhem are beautiful visions of the mostly paradisiacal limbo Susie now inhabits. Jackson, a supreme fantasist, lets loose here, often to wonderful effect. Susie lives in an ever-morphing landscape. Like a Surrealist painting, it is a dreamscape that reflects her inner life — but also events on earth. Great fields of grain cede to wintry peaks and ocean vistas, a tree abruptly loses (and later regains) its leaves in a sudden magical change of seasons, and a gazebo uprooted from a suburban mall is by turns welcoming and frightening.
The interpenetration of earth and heaven reaches its zenith in one remarkable cinematic sequence. Susie’s father, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg, looking too young for the role), is a dedicated craftsman of ships-in-a-bottle, a benign equivalent to Mr. Harvey’s obsession with dollhouses. Susie (Saoirse Ronan, very pale and not as likable as one might wish) was his treasured helper, the daughter due to inherit his collection. Fast-forward to Susie’s memory-based heaven, where huge glass bottles filled with ships glide towards an ocean shore. As a grieving, raging Jack begins smashing his miniatures, cracks appear in the bottles in Susie’s ocean – a ravishing image that illuminates Jackson’s cosmology.
What the film version of The Lovely Bones omits, however, is a full-on depiction of a family in crisis. Wahlberg’s Jack Salmon has his moments (mostly of acting out), but Rachel Weisz’s Abigail Salmon, the mother who has reluctantly traded in Existentialist tracts for child-rearing manuals, remains a cipher. With the excision of her relationship with Fenerman, her desertion of her family makes even less sense in the film than it did in the book. Rose McIver is a fierce presence as Lindsey, Susie’s younger sister, and Reece Ritchie is seductive as Ray Singh, Susie’s first love. But the one real star turn in the film, aside from Tucci’s chilling portrayal, is Susan Sarandon’s over-the-top comic take on the smoking, drinking, wildly life-affirming Grandma Lynn, whose housekeeping gaffes include turning dinner into a fire and laundry into a flood.
Sebold summoned us to embrace her vision of death’s aftermath with luminous writing that yoked the ordinary and the supernatural. Her prose gave vivid expression to what she called “the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human.” Jackson’s meandering and aesthetically indulgent film adaptation reaches for a similar intensity, but falls short.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
Wilder violated realist conventions by having his Stage Manager deliberately manipulate time and space in a rural New Hampshire town. Sebold launches The Lovely Bones with an even more unconventional jolt, by revealing that her narrator is a murdered 14-year-old. Looking down from her personal heaven, Susie Salmon, an aspiring photographer, remembers her brief, happy life at school and home in snapshot moments. At the same time, she observes and haunts her grieving family and friends, as well as the not-so-kindly neighborhood sociopath who lured her to her death. Set in the humdrum precincts of the Philadelphia suburbs, where schoolchildren bully and flirt and fall in love, the book is smart and achingly tender in its depiction of the various ways that grief can manifest itself, from denial and flight to obsession and the desire for revenge. Some readers may struggle with the novel’s fantastical elements, but, on a metaphorical level, Susie’s continuing presence in the lives of those who loved her makes deep emotional sense.
But film often forces us to take the metaphorical literally. And that’s where the problems of the current cinematic adaptation of The Lovely Bones begin. Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning writer-producer-director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has sacrificed much of the book’s delicate emotionality in favor of the clichés of horror-fantasy. While Jackson’s direction hypes the book’s suspense, the screenplay, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson, omits some of the novel’s more sexually disturbing elements, from Susie’s rape to her mother’s affair with a homicide detective to Susie’s supernatural sexual consummation with the Indian boy she loved. (The PG-13 movie gives us just a final kiss.)
Instead of portraying the complex lineaments of grief, Jackson pairs standard horror-film tropes with flamboyant surrealism. His tool box includes numerous wide-angle shots, rapid cuts, and eerie close-ups of menacing faces and objects. Unremarkable suburban houses turn out to be haunted, while ominous music and gestures foreshadow every twist. At one point, Susie’s killer, George Harvey (a sublimely creepy, almost unrecognizable Stanley Tucci), and homicide detective Len Fenerman (The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli, cast against type) stare at each other through the windows of one of Mr. Harvey’s elaborately crafted dollhouses — an off-kilter encounter that leads precisely nowhere.
Juxtaposed with intimations of earthly mayhem are beautiful visions of the mostly paradisiacal limbo Susie now inhabits. Jackson, a supreme fantasist, lets loose here, often to wonderful effect. Susie lives in an ever-morphing landscape. Like a Surrealist painting, it is a dreamscape that reflects her inner life — but also events on earth. Great fields of grain cede to wintry peaks and ocean vistas, a tree abruptly loses (and later regains) its leaves in a sudden magical change of seasons, and a gazebo uprooted from a suburban mall is by turns welcoming and frightening.
The interpenetration of earth and heaven reaches its zenith in one remarkable cinematic sequence. Susie’s father, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg, looking too young for the role), is a dedicated craftsman of ships-in-a-bottle, a benign equivalent to Mr. Harvey’s obsession with dollhouses. Susie (Saoirse Ronan, very pale and not as likable as one might wish) was his treasured helper, the daughter due to inherit his collection. Fast-forward to Susie’s memory-based heaven, where huge glass bottles filled with ships glide towards an ocean shore. As a grieving, raging Jack begins smashing his miniatures, cracks appear in the bottles in Susie’s ocean – a ravishing image that illuminates Jackson’s cosmology.What the film version of The Lovely Bones omits, however, is a full-on depiction of a family in crisis. Wahlberg’s Jack Salmon has his moments (mostly of acting out), but Rachel Weisz’s Abigail Salmon, the mother who has reluctantly traded in Existentialist tracts for child-rearing manuals, remains a cipher. With the excision of her relationship with Fenerman, her desertion of her family makes even less sense in the film than it did in the book. Rose McIver is a fierce presence as Lindsey, Susie’s younger sister, and Reece Ritchie is seductive as Ray Singh, Susie’s first love. But the one real star turn in the film, aside from Tucci’s chilling portrayal, is Susan Sarandon’s over-the-top comic take on the smoking, drinking, wildly life-affirming Grandma Lynn, whose housekeeping gaffes include turning dinner into a fire and laundry into a flood.
Sebold summoned us to embrace her vision of death’s aftermath with luminous writing that yoked the ordinary and the supernatural. Her prose gave vivid expression to what she called “the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human.” Jackson’s meandering and aesthetically indulgent film adaptation reaches for a similar intensity, but falls short.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, is a regular contributor to Obit.
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