Why The Hell Is The Lovely Bones Pissing Off Everybody So Badly?

Spoilers

Lets get this out of the way. A lot of people are getting very pissed off at The Lovely Bones. Even Roger Ebert, who has been pretty mellow since his surgery cracked his knuckles and wrote what’s less of a review then a napalming of the movie. I mean read that thing. God Damn (Although I do find it comforting, that Ebert can still right an absolute scorcher when he puts his mind to it).

He’s not alone either its virtually impossible to find a good review, Peter Travers, Richard Corliss, and Drew McWeeney are all positive but that’s about it. The movie’s a Thirty Six on Rotten Tomatoes, forty two on Meta Critic. These are the type of scores you see for the new Renny Harlin movie, not the work of a major director.

So just what is it about The Lovely Bones that pissed everyone off so much? And just so I’m being clear here, I feel as though there IS a lot wrong with that movie. There are two or three sequences so ridiculous that its impossible to watch them and still feel connected to the film. Just jarringly wrong notes. One involving Mark Wahlberg, a cornfield, and a baseball bat, suddenly turned Marky Mark’s meek accountant character into his Dingham from The Departed, I was shocked Shipping Out To The Boston wasn’t playing (In all fairness Wahlberg otherwise acquits himself quite well, for once using his natural awkwardness and inarticulacy for the character rather then against him). Tucci’s bizarre horror movie style death is so jarringly awkward that it took me a minute to realize that it was actually happening and wasn’t just a joke. The film’s concurrent climax is another harsh misstep, mainly because of how utterly nonplussed everyone seems to be. I mean if you suddenly found yourself having sex with the fourteen year old ghost of your first crush (Remember this is YEARS after the fact) wouldn’t you be a bit weirded out?

And yet, there are moments and images in The Lovely Bones that stubbornly work. And I found it to be on the whole quite moving. It plays almost like the Anti Zodiac. While Zodiac showed how tragedy and evil weave themselves in the course of time, doing incalculable damage as they go along. The Lovely Bones shows how in the face of eternity tragedy, and evil are ultimately rendered insignificant.

And that’s the idea that seems to have gotten out Ebert’s and other’s whacking sticks. Now look let’s say you don’t believe in heaven and all this God bullshit. That’s a reasonable place to stand. But you can’t accept it on say purely story based terms? Or even metaphorical ones? I don’t believe there’s a town south of the border named El Ray where the buildings are made of human shit, but I’m willing to roll with what Jim Thompson was going for. Besides the heaven of The Lovely Bones is so stringently non denominational that getting pissed on religious grounds seems faintly ridiculous.

Another thing that seems to have pissed off people, is the film’s handling of the rape murder at the center of the film. I admit I haven’t read Sebold’s novel (though I’m curious to) so I don’t know how graphic its handled there but the film, implies much and shows little. And as such its probably the first movie I’ve ever come across that is getting bashed for not showing the graphic rape and murder of a fourteen year old child.

But to suggest that the film somehow doesn’t confront the sickening weight of the crime is ludicrous. The scene where Susie watches the clean up of her killing, as her killer (Stanley Tucci, Great) meticulously wipes away any trace that she ever existed, is one of the most gut wrenching scenes I watched in a movie this year.

Even the imagery has been taking a licking, with Jackson’s, surely one of the most confident stylists working today, vision of the “in between” being blasted as derivative of his work in Heavenly Creatures at best, and looking like the world’s most expensive Loreal commercial at worst.

But well yeah, of course it does. Of course its an immature looking world. Susie is Immature. Death as a consequence tends to halt maturity pretty much dead in its tracks. The resulting imagery is still primal and communicative.

So in short is the Lovely Bones a big clumsy, awkward, earnest movie that makes some bad choices. Yes. Do you have to like it? Of course not. But pretending it’s not a work worthy of consideration is foolish. Every director has a film where they just have to take their lumps. And unfortunately for Jackson, this seems like his turn.