criterionforum.org

Plus you'd think after working with her for months, he'd get a certain co-star's last name right.

This is definitely a film about mood/tone/atmosphere/emotion above all else. Viewing it with keeping that in mind, it's still more worthwhile than most junk off the Big Studio assembly line, though still clearly flawed (the ending is particularly drawn out; Susan Sarandon gives another loopy performance like the one she gave in "Elizabethtown").

Having seen this now the one question that lingers with me is why it went so utterly unnoticed during its initial release. It's not a good movie by any means--it is, in fact, fatally flawed on some fundamental level or probably multiple such levels--but this never meant much to popular audience consumption. I wonder about this because every time I venture over to someone's house they almost inevitably always have a copy of this book on their shelf somewhere and yet none of those people saw the film. Were they even aware there was a film? Maybe the failing was on the part of the production company. I know this was meant to be a big end of year awards picture and when those kind of acknowledgments failed to materialize maybe the plug got pulled abruptly and prematurely on wider distribution. Still doesn't make sense though. You would think they would want to push this and recoup their investment with the popular audience. Maybe someone had an issue with Jackson. Or maybe the audience didn't turn up because the movie foregrounds too much the ethereal nature of that aspect of the story. Maybe they didn't like overtly recognizing what kind of an experience they were participating in. I can certainly say that it doesn't motivate me to want to read the book.

The one thing I will give the film is that Jackson is able to craft effective sequences when he is focused upon doing so and this is more than can be said for most of the studio genre hacks. He has real skill and there is plenty of evidence of that on display here. In fact, one wishes Joe Johnston and his ilk would just sit down and look at the scene in which Lindsey is discovered in Harvey's house. That's an absolute model perfect suspense sequence. Also, Jackson is quite capable with certain actors, especially the appropriately cast Saoirse Ronan, from whom he manages to elicit a very well drawn subtle set of responses. Still, the problem is that the success of individual sequences is self-contained; they only ever work as sequences unto themselves. There is no successful integration and the film utterly fails as a comprehensive whole. Is that Jackson's fault or Sebold's? I know he changed certain things but are the core problems with the original source material?

The failings of the film are many and so deeply entrenched that it often felt like every single scene contained something wrong or ill conceived (i.e. the awkward and ham fisted way in which Jackson over plays Jack's dawning intuitive knowledge of Harvey's gulit). Even Susie's final narration is banal and shrug inducing after what we have witnessed. I'm amazed that this film actually wound up making Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come look solid. That movie has a remarkable vision of the afterlife steeped in an avalanche of cultural tradition that gives it weight, at least in terms of aesthetic continuity if nothing else. It also manages to convey the despair that complicates the implied spiritual compensation much better, though only briefly. I know that the difference is that this is "Susie's Heaven" but not enough is made of that distinction or what it heralds. Not enough is made of anything.

As I said, I'm not sure how much of the blame to lay at Jackson's door but I'm not inclined to let him off the hook as he could have justified changes that would have made his film function as a unified whole and not a series of mostly shallow set pieces at odds with itself tonally and thematically. I went in to this wanting to like it and kept myself open for as long as I could to what he may have been up to. Unfortunately nothing substantive ever develops and one wonders yet again what it was about this piece people were primarily responding to. I suppose one could cynically say the utopic Heaven presented may hold the key to mass appeal (though not enough to translate to box office results?) but the Heaven conceit here is really just that, a conceit, and applied anemically and, yes, cynically even (is that Sebold or Jackson? Both?). Because what would the further implications of this additional dimension of reality be if it were simply a given as it is presented here? To what degree does it correspond to the assumed "real'? The question does not have to nag and, in fact, the issue could work in a fascinating way to complement, rather than simply illustrate, Susie's presumed adolescent narcissism. Jackson never communicates this idea though so we are stuck being distracted by metaphysical questions he is unable to address: is the penguin in the igloo snowglobe meant as a critique? Is there a Hell to this Heaven? To what extent is Susie a "ghost"? Is there cosmic justice? Does it matter? Should it? To whom? Is it ultimately a lesser consideration than love? To what extent would that constitute a meaning which we could recognize? etc.

I suspect the real allure is more likely the salacious nature of the material, an attraction made acceptable with the inclusion of a transcendent love or cosmic consolation. But this is all handled in far too confused of a fashion to ever offer that up persuasively. Jackson at least seems to hedge his bets constantly throughout; it isn't so much that he seeks to complicate his scenario with conflicting readings, it's more that he is confused himself. The tonal imbalance and the absurd condensed plotting all do nothing but alienate because they register as either indifferent or uncomprehending (Rachel Weisz suddenly disappears to work in a vineyard to cleanse her soul? Another middle class fantasia?). The eventual fate of the Tucci character, for instance, suggests some divine retribution (or personal? another Big Question) while also potentailly just a "shit-happens-and-there-is-no-larger-justice" kind of nihilism to offset the enforced familial love. But as the film's cosmology feels so utterly arbitrary and hollow anyway the distinction fails to matter. So the scene goes flat.

It would have been interesting to see what a director like Lynch could have done with this material. I can't help but think he would have infused it with, if not a comprehensive quality of coherence, at least a sense of appropriately elusive mystery; something to suggest the potential rich depths of the material if it were accepted as indicator of a larger contextual reality that can only barely be grasped. Jackson wants to play around with keeping the whole thing pitched to allow for an either/or reading: legitimate cosmic reality or purely psychological placation. But the narrowness of what is depicted and how it is seen actively works to prevent any more profound set of observations or insights from occuring naturally. It simply and adamantly does not allow for an expansion of meaning and impact that would result from an attempt at conflation of these two perspectives.

On the other end of the spectrum, Spielberg would have likely also done better as he is more of an unabashed melodramatist and, partially due to this, more accomplished at it. I think he could have drawn more from the scenario by indulging its implications and I even think he would have done more with the violence--not necessarily depicting greater detail but more capably handling its effects, the way that it marks people and communities. The ethical dimension of the present film virtually fails to register at all. As it stands, Daniel Mendelsohn's great essay on the book's failing to properly represent tragedy holds double for the film.

I have to admit though, I would re-watch this with a Jackson commentary; I would love to hear his thoughts on this material if he were to expand on them. Tellingly perhaps there is no commentary--a 3 hour "making of", yes, but no commentary.

The 3 hour making of is worth ten commentaries. While I wouldn't put it on par with Hearts of darkness nor Burden of Dreams it really is an interesting look into the meltdown of a blockbuster.

Ryan Gosling cops to having been fired for being fat.

Gosling arrived on set bearded and 60 pounds overweight—a physical transformation he hadn’t discussed with the director, but which he felt was a good move for the character, saying, “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.” Jackson disagreed

Oh those actors

If Gosling were playing Peter Jackson, though...

Peter's actually quite trim these days.

Well, first, thanks to John Cope for some interesting observations in a thread that pretty much stopped dead once everyone heard it was a bad film. I'd like to offer my own apologia, because I think the Lovely Bones is a terrific film when looked at from what I feel is a necessary perspective, which is that this is an admittedly dark children's movie in the great lost style of the 80s when kids' films were frankly horribly cynical and dangerous underneath their innocuous veneer. I haven't read the source material, probably never will, but I suspect that Sebold's work is attempting something else than what Jackson's done with it here, which is make a confounding mishmash of every competing juvenile emotional response of fourteen-year-olds to mass stimulus. Everything in the pic is cranked up past ten with the hysteria and flippant severity of youth, and the spastic camera and wonderfully unreal special effects turn this film into the Lisa Frank notebook cover from Hell. I had to chuckle when I read Ebert's snipe above that the film doesn't understand teenage girls. This movie understands the way the young process the world all too well, and perhaps this accounts for the utter bewilderment of what is a predominately older pool of critics, all closer to fifty than fifteen, to the film? The film may be a mess, but it's a good mess, like pouring a little bit of all the fountain drinks into your cup at a restaurant-- the undefinable merits of both are recognizable, I would think, to those not too far gone from youth themselves.

I posted over at Shadowplay that I'd bracket this film along with Peter Jackson's other film The Frighteners (which is a film I'd choose as a "good mess" piece of work!) If it is OK I'll cross post it here, since it still mostly conveys my feelings about the film. Though I think it is interesting that although I trash the film, in the end I also picked up on the child's eye view of grown ups feeding into the somewhat exaggerated performances, which domino thinks more kindly of:

This film [Lovely Bones] was far too corny and far too pussyfooting around the idea of child murder, which strangely made the theme seem in more bad taste than if they had dwelt on it in detail. It makes a fascinating contrast with The Frighteners, which is a film I really love, but which fuses light-hearted comedy romance of a GhostBusters style film with a really dark serial killer plotline (the hospital massacre is something astounding to see in an ostensible family film) and a horrific comeuppance for our diabolical couple.

Yet The Frighteners feels as if, by not soft peddling the necessary horror, that it retains some inherent internal integrity, and makes the otherwise generic light romance scenes between Michael J. Fox and Trini Alvadaro feel much more powerful and important as a defence against some truly dark forces in the world. The trailer shows the difficulty of selling that film, with far too much emphasis on the ghostly companion shtick that only occupies about the first quarter of the film.

While I heard that The Frighteners itself had conflicts between the filmmaker and the stuido about the tone of the film (I can see how it could have been a difficult sell), it really deserves its cult status. The Lovely Bones on the other hand feels compromised tonally, falling between two stools by being too upsetting for ‘general’ audiences by simply dealing with such material, and too ‘soft’ for Jackson regulars who didn’t expect a side stepping of some of the more difficult aspects of the book. I was glad to see Jackson giving Jeffrey Combs another supporting role though (again strenghtening the connection between The Lovely Bones and The Frighteners)

In terms of the Lovely Bones my issues were that for empathy the viewer needs to be tied to the girl's presence constantly, witnessing with her, otherwise you lose that sense of connection and don’t know whether she is aware of the same events that you as a viewer are. I haven’t thought this through too much but I think that because it is such an extremely stylised form of experience and film, these films from the ghosts perspective need that point of view to be prioritised, with the ‘real world’ beyond only glimpsed through a constantly imposed layer of the afterlife. This can be conscious on the part of the ghosts, such as Beetlejuice and so on, or unconscious and used as the ‘twist’ at the end that they were dead all along, but this single perspective appears to be a fundamental rule of the genre. If you jump outside that to show the ‘real world’ then the strength of the bonds that are tying the ghost to the living gets severed, along with that of the viewer to the action – suddenly we aren’t as totally invested with this already departed character (it is telling how many films show living people passing into the afterlife, likely for reasons of universal interest in that aspect(!), but few films simply start off in another world)

While I have major issues with Enter The Void, it sticks closely to this rule of staying within the point of view (albeit applies it relentlessly and mercilessly!) And one of my favourite James Herbert books was Fluke, the fantasy about the man reincarnated as a dog and who still remembers fragments of his past life and a conspriacy endangering his family that he has to stop, all whilst having this ‘past life’ drift away to be replaced with doggy thoughts and feelings. It is a very beautiful book about acceptance of new circumstances, made into a rather disappointing film with Matthew Modine (a talking animal picture likely following in the wake of Babe’s success) that doesn’t really scratch the surface of those issues too deeply.

Plus my other issue with The Lovely Bones was the characterisation of the serial killer being far too obvious – the creepy, loner, weird looking guy across the street that anyone conditioned by decades of television and films would have immediately pegged as the murderer ages before! This is something which makes the family seem particularly deluded, though often Jackson does use broadly caricatured characters such as these to portray a kind of childlike view of ‘grown ups’ and their behaviour, so it might make more sense when viewed from this perspective.

colinr0380 wrote:I was glad to see Jackson giving Jeffrey Combs another supporting role though (again strenghtening the connection between The Lovely Bones and The Frighteners)

Really? This is the first I've heard of Combs making an appearance in The Lovely Bones, unless I'm misinterpreting your review. He's hilarious in The Frighteners, somehow managing to out-do Bruce Campbell and Jim Carrey in the rubber-faced splatshtick stakes.

Oops That shows that I should have thoroughly checked it before re-posting, as he doesn't appear in The Lovely Bones! I'm trying to think back to what I meant when I originally wrote that - that it would have been better had he appeared (he certainly does the caricatured 'evil authority figure' role that would fit in with the heightened atmosphere of The Lovely Bones)? I remember that the otherwise rubbish I Still Know What You Did Last Summer was almost single-handedly saved by his presence. Or had I watched something in which he appeared at the same time as the other film and got them mixed up? Anyway I have to apologise for that mistake!

He is one of the highlights of The Frighteners though, among a really strong supporting cast.

Damn, I would have sought this out had Combs made an appearance, he's a criminally umder-utilized actor.