The Lovely Bones and The Last Station (From The Oxford Times)

The Lovely Bones and The Last Station

3:42pm Wednesday 17th February 2010 in

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There is life after death in Peter Jackson’s visually stunning interpretation of The Lovely Bones, the best-seller by Alice Sebold, which proves to be one adaptation too far for the Oscar-winning director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.

Cutting back and forth between the real world and a colour-saturated heavenly limbo, the film details the efforts of a murdered 14-year-old schoolgirl who helps her grieving father apprehend her killer from beyond the grave.

In doing so, the girl’s tortured spirit can attain lasting peace, along with the murderer’s other victims.

Jackson’s screenplay, co-written with wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is caught in its own limbo, unable to bridge the narrative divide between the corporeal and ethereal planes where the story unfolds.

A miasma of computer-generated special effects in the otherworldly sections, courtesy of the digital wizards at WETA, is distracting and we yearn for a speedy return to the drabness of reality. Fantasy is vastly over-rated.

On her way home from school in early December 1973, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is lured to her death by neighbour George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who dismembers the girl and hides her remains in a cast iron safe in his basement. Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) and his colleagues never find Susie, just her woollen hat in a cornfield and traces of her blood.

The teenager’s father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) and booze-soaked grandmother Lynn (Susan Sarandon) are denied a chance to bury the child. Jack sacrifices his marriage to embark on a campaign to track down his daughter’s killer, but there is no evidence, and the police grow tired of his theories.

Classmate Ruth Conners (Carolyn Dando) is touched by Susie’s spirit and could provide the link between life and death. Meanwhile, George watches the Salmons closely from his home across the street, fixating on Susie’s sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver). “Mr Harvey began to feel a familiar itch,” confides the murdered teenager in voiceover. “It had been a long time now . . .”

The Lovely Bones is hamstrung by Wahlberg’s inability to convey a single genuine emotion. He wrings crocodile tears in vain, and tries to make us care about his patriarch’s quest for vengeance.

Ironically, the dead have far more life, especially Ronan who delivers Sebold’s words in heart-tugging voiceover: “ would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, as you will one day be, forever safe . . . but it’s not quite like that.”

On terra firma, we latch on to McIver, who breaks into George’s house to seek clues just as he returns home in the film’s nerve-shredding, standout sequence. We are equally mesmerised by Tucci, who inhabits his role completely, and feel a chill down the back of our spines every time his soulless eyes bore into the camera.

It’s easy to appreciate creative genius, but it must be hell to live with it. Based on the novel by Jan Prini, The Last Station is a love story set during the final year of Leo Tolstoy’s life, focusing on the terrible strain borne by his wife, the Countess. Unable to live together under the same roof without descending into spiteful bickering, yet unwilling to live apart because of their deep love, the elderly couple plays out these final months against a backdrop of political intrigue. In truth, were it not for Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren’s Oscar nominations as Best Actor and Best Actress, Michael Hoffman’s history lesson could have debuted on DVD.