Having aced The Lord of the Rings, one would think bringing worlds to the screen that before resided only in the imagination would have been a doddle for Peter Jackson and his New Zealand-based workshop of Weta wonders. Thing is, to cinematically create what heaven is like for a teenage girl in the 1970s is rather different to all those orcs and dwarves...
Still, undeterred, and always after a challenge, Jackson took on Alice Sebold’s novel — narrated by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who has been raped and murdered, and is now looking down on her family, willing them to discover her murderer — and, sadly, pretty much took the adaptation to hell.
Jackson’s main problem is that his imagining involves a vast amount of screen time following Susie and her sidekick (another of her murderer’s victims) as they bound around the brightly coloured, ethereal meadows, when really what everyone was so gripped by in the book was the meat of the story back on the ground.
With so much heaven and not enough earth, strong performances from Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan, as the astute, luminous teenager (when she’s talking and not just frolicking in front of the green screen), and Susan Sarandon, as her heavily eyelinered, fag-toting, straight-talking grandmother, are sidelined. Indeed, only Stanley Tucci is given the screen time to completely embody his character, that of the chillingly insidious neighbour who haunts Susie’s domestic life and her nightmares.
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Creating Susie’s heaven was surely the main challenge when translating Sebold’s novel to the screen, but wallowing in said creation is the main downfall of The Lovely Bones. For Jackson, his CGI creation may top the billing, but most viewers won’t share his sense of wonder.