“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973.” These chilling lines start the novel and the subsequent film, The Lovely Bones that debuted #3 this past weekend at the box office. Peter Jackson, best known for directing the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, delivers a lyrical and hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Alice Sebold’s popular novel.
Susie Salmon (Sairose Ronan) is just an average 14-year-old girl, the product of a loving and supportive family. She attends high school, maintains friendships, cultivates interests (film, photography), and harbors a crush on Ray (Reece Ritchie), a dreamy senior who reciprocates her feelings.
However, her insulated world disintegrates when Susie is lured by their creepy neighbor, George Harvey (a scarily effective Stanley Tucci) into an underground shelter in the cornfield behind her idyllic suburban subdivision. Although the subsequent brutal rape, described quite graphically in the novel, is only suggested, and the murder takes place off camera, I must warn you that the prelude to this scene has unnerved me since, particularly as you see Susie’s slow realization that just like her town sinkhole—where people come to throw away their broken appliances and random junk—she too, is about to be swallowed whole by the earth, courtesy of a monster beyond her childhood imagining.
Susie becomes trapped in the “in-between,” not quite able to enjoy the rewards of heaven, but yet not quite able to relinquish hold of the earth and the people she left behind. Susie is tormented, forced to witness her family collapse in the wake of her loss, as her mother (Rachel Weisz) unable to cope with the pain, deserts the family, her father (Mark Wahlberg) becomes obsessed with finding her killer, and her eccentric and alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon) tries to serve as a sense of normalcy for her brother and sister (Christian Ashdale and Rose McIver).
Susie’s in-between is an ever-changing panorama of landscapes and wonderments as she cavorts and plays with a companion about her age (Nikki SooHoo) who has assumed the name “Holly Golightly,” Audery Hepburn’s famed party girl moniker in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But any joys Susie experiences are short-lived as she begins to reverberate with the pain of her loss—this becomes particularly poignant as she witnesses her younger sister, Lindsey’s (Rose McIver) first kiss. Susie slowly begins to realize that her sister will continue to surpass her with experiences she will never have. Susie struggles with the knowledge that her killer walks unfazed and free among all those whom she desperately loved and lost. Ultimately, Susie must decide to confront the reality of her own death or contend with being suspended between two very different worlds.
The Lovely Bones is a spectacular feat, both a visually stunning and emotionally moving journey. In our world today, where child abductions are hardly newsworthy and Amber Alerts are routinely issued, the film serves as a very real cautionary tale of the fragility of the life that we inhabit. Indeed, as Susie states in the beginning of the film “we were not those unlucky people to whom bad things happened,” although unfortunately we must contend with the unsettling fact that bad things happen to good people everyday. The Lovely Bones also serves as a testament to life, to love without bounds, and to the resilience of the human spirit.