Review of The Lovely Bones (2009) by Chads. — 16 Jan 2010

The problem with "The Lovely Bones" is that nobody jumps anybody's bones. The filmmaker didn't have the guts. Six years earlier, Lynne Ramsey owned the rights to the Alice Sebold novel, but she bailed around the time that this literary novel unexpectedly found its way into the hands of readers more used to Nicholas Sparks-type fare than a New York Times Notable Book.

The Scottish filmmaker, with two highly regarded films to her credit("Ratcatcher" and "Morvern Callar"), both gritty in the best indie tradition, probably wouldn't blink at the prospect of shooting a rape scene involving a minor.

She's an artist, after all, not a moralist. Obvious to fans of the 2002 literary sensation, "The Lovely Bones" begs to be smaller in scale, and with Ramsay at the helm, there would've been a deemphasization on visualizing the Salmon girl's realm, which is nothing more than a timekiller.

The story is supposed to be about the living. Since the Salmon girl is dead, arguably, all the moviegoer needs is her disembodied voice; the moviegoer will surely find the panoramas of the "In-Between" quite pretty, but inert, like all spectacle, all CGI effects, even the good ones.

Worse yet, "The Lovely Bones" chooses the wrong person, the father(Mark Wahlberg), to serve as our entry point into the unconsolable grief felt by the left behind. Lindsey(Amanda Michalka) should have been the one to carry the film, but Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are big stars, so the younger Salmon girl is reduced to being the catalyst for the film's wrongheaded foray into suspense.

(Just like Richard Eyre's adaptation of Zoe Heller's "Notes on a Scandal(What Was She Thinking?)", the film is a lot more suspenseful than the source material.) "The Lovely Bones" needed a woman's touch.

Ramsay would have depicted unflinchingly the Judy Blume-esque details of Lindsey's physical relationship with her boyfriend, despite both participants being underaged. It was important to show how the sister's death forced the younger Salmon girl to grow up fast.

The sex was a coping mechanism. But, no. The filmmaker tried to outdo Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come" in trying to render the best heaven ever. Unfortunately, the blockbuster approach will ultimately disappoint the book's fans.

In a nutshell, the filmmaker is afraid of the vagina, even though the female anatomy as depicted in the Sebold novel isn't meant to be the least bit sensationalistic or tittilating.