(Richard Kelly had a similar field day with 1976-vintage patterned wallpaper and fat neckties in “The Box,” his recent entry in the suburban-’70s-supernatural sweepstakes.) And this director’s fondness for odd angles, intense close-ups and trick perspectives he films one scene as if peering out from the rooms of a dollhouse animates a drab Pennsylvania landscape of shopping malls and half-developed farmland. Yes, he grooves on the wild color schemes and peculiar fashions of 1973. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson’s stylish, busy technique makes more acute. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film it makes us, in effect, Susie’s fellow ghosts a detachment that Mr. We are always in Susie’s company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits.

She is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. By all appearances he has gotten away with his crime, and Susie hovers in the in-between partly in the hope that she might find a way to bring him to justice. Susie’s sister, Lindsey, is played by Rose McIver her brother, Buckley, by Christian Thomas Ashdale, while George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), the reclusive, seething killer, prunes his rosebushes and decorates dollhouses. The drama is all down below, where the surviving members of the Salmon family contend with the loss of their eldest child. Jackson’s interest in the “in-between,” as this suburb of heaven is called, is primarily visual. “Heaven,” a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is “a place where nothing ever happens.”Īccordingly Mr. It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. Susie’s unearthly home, in the book a minimally sketched, nondenominational purgatory where the dead loiter on their way to heaven and keep tabs on unfinished business down on earth, has been expanded into a digitally rendered Wonderland of rioting metaphors, crystal seas and floating topiary. Jackson’s film, from a script he wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his frequent collaborators, shows less audacity and too much art. The novel is conceived with enough audacity to make this gimmick intriguing, and executed with enough art to make it effective. She makes the victim, a daughter of ’70s suburbia named Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), an omniscient, beyond-the-grave narrator, with a lively voice and a comfortable perch in the afterlife from which to survey the doings of her family, her friends and the neighbor who killed her. Sebold pushes the dead-child narrative to an emotional extreme, and at the same time undermines its exploitive tendencies, by means of a simple and radical formal device. In spite of the horrific act at the center of the story the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl the novel is not depressing or assaultive but rather, somewhat perversely, warm, hopeful and even occasionally funny. “The Lovely Bones,” Alice Sebold’s 2002 best seller, now a film directed by Peter Jackson, stands out as a singularly bold and complex treatment of this grim and apparently inexhaustible theme.

This is hardly news (Charles Dickens made a nice living trafficking in the suffering of minors), but for some reason the past decade has seen an epidemic of cinematic and literary crimes against the young. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril. We all like children, and at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama we seem to like them best when they’re abused, endangered or dead.

Mr bones 2 movie summary