There are moments in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel The Lovely Bones that are as good as anything he’s ever done, reminding me often of my personal favorite of the Oscar-winning director’s career the eloquent and ethereal Heavenly Creatures. Tapping into both the tragic story’s underlying menace but also crafting an elegant coming of age allegory of longing and regret, the filmmaker crafts scenes of fantastical impact that simply blew me away.

A young girl attempts to solve her murder from the afterlife in Paramount Pictures/DreamWorks' The Lovely Bones

Problem is he just doesn’t create enough of them to overcome many of the film’s frustrating shortcomings. The pacing is uneven, the tone constantly wavers and the narratives point of view is shockingly inconsistent. Every time things begin to pick up steam Jackson suddenly slows them to an absolute halt, intricately crafted momentum unhappily destroyed in little less than the flash of instant.

Too bad, because by and large the director does create enough of a hypnotic spell that I genuinely wanted to see where he was going to take things next. A thriller mainly told from the perspective of a murdered teenage girl stuck in an afterlife limbo trying her best to assist her family and friends discover the identity of her killer, the movie certainly has a mesmerizing and distinct point of view I was utterly captivated by.

The problem is Jackson (once more working with fellow The Lord of the Rings co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) lets his own attentions waver. One moment we’re following Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) as she recollects on her life and death, the next we’re dancing in laundry room full of soap suds with her chain-smoking alcoholic grandmother Lynn (Susan Sarandon). Suddenly we’re back peering through our protagonist’s eyes as she watches her next door neighbor killer Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci) try and dispose of her body only to suddenly be thrust back into the head of her grieving father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) or to be listening to a new voiceover from her sadly diminished mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz).

Quite frankly there is no consistency here, no attempt to keep things as focused as they probably should be. This is a mystery of observation, but when the observer spends so much time out of the picture it becomes increasingly difficult as things go on to understand why she’s sticking around again in the first place. The movie continually waffles, and while Susie’s story certainly has its innately melancholic and emotional power Jackson never delivers upon it as fully as I kept feeling like he should have.

But back to those moments that do work, for a moment. There are points where this movie comes alive like nothing else, scenes of such startling impact and immediacy I could feel my breath quicken and my pulse race. Susie’s death is as magnificent a piece of filmmaking as anything Jackson has ever unleashed before, while a sequence between Mr. Harvey and Mr. Salmon in the backyard of the former oozes tension. Early scenes of a teenage girl realizing the first pangs of young love are almost embarrassingly blissful (which is a good thing), getting to see them ultimately acted upon – if only for an instant – so beautifully touching the moment brought tears to my eyes.

I will say I didn’t mind the scenes of Susie in limbo as much as a few other critics seem to have, and while these moments are admittedly overproduced and stylized they certainly aren’t as putridly self-involved or as syrupy as those on display in the rancid Robin Williams afterlife drama What Dreams May Come. I also found Brian Eno’s (The Jacket) score to be beyond reproach, its ghostly strains fitting flawlessly with the majority of the images Jackson puts on display.

There has been a lot of talk that Tucci is going to get his first Academy Award nomination for his work here. While he is very good (as is the entire cast, even Wahlberg), if he is indeed going to get an Oscar nod for a 2009 performance I’d rather it were for Julie & Julia instead of this. While the actor is creepy, and while he refuses to overplay things to the point they would devolve into caricature, Mr. Harvey is still a very one note kind of guy. There is no depth, no nuance to this portrait, and while I had many problems with that summertime Meryl Streep/Amy Adams hit his gloriously multifaceted work within it certainly was not one of them.

No, if anyone deserves praise here it is Ronan. Not only does the youngster deliver on the promise she beauteously hinted at in Atonement, she makes Susie a vital and electric presence even during the moments when the filmmakers infuriatingly twist things away from her. The actress does so very much with so very little, and even though the character she is playing is dead Ronan is still more alive then anyone else in the entire movie. 

None of which is enough to make the movie any less of a disappointment. While Jackson rises to the occasion during random scenes (a climactic bit featuring Rose McIver as Susie’s sister Lindsey is sensational), he doesn’t do so enough to make up for his many missteps. The film feels like it’s adrift without a rudder much of the time, and while I applaud many of the individual efforts as a whole The Lovely Bones is as stuck in creative limbo as its melancholic main character.

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)  

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