The Lovely Bones

When I read Alice Sebold's novel in 2002, I had the child-like longing to see it made into a film. I wanted to see how the dreamy conceptualization of the afterlife would manifest on screen. With Peter Jackson's rampantly fantastical imagination, I was not disappointed. Jackson cast Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) as Susie Salmon, a young girl who gets brutally raped and murdered in a small Pennsylvania town in the early 1970's. Ronan is delicious as Susie, her cerulean eyes wider than ever. She is innocence personified, which a modern-day viewer might misinterpret as contrivance unless that viewer is old enough to remember just how different life was in the seventies. In the absence of 24-hour media, Amber-alerts and "To Catch a Predator", child abductions were not something parents feared. Susie watches her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) from the "in-between" world, not yet ready to let go of her rage towards her killer (creepily fleshed out by Stanley Tucci). She anxiously wills her family to discover that the man responsible for their pain lives just across the street. Susan Sarandon plays Susie's boozy broad of a grandmother, called to help the Salmon's get through the daily grind of life once they learn that Susie is gone. Sarandon is just about the sexiest, most earthy grandmother ever captured on film. She is a stark contrast to Weisz, who never really manages to convince as a mother dealing with the one thing no mother should ever have to deal with.
While Ronan, Sarandon and Tucci all act beautifully, the real standout is Wahlberg. Wahlberg's earlier work in films Boogie Nights and The Big Hit was so good because he was fervently committed to his characters. He had a sweet and innocent quality that seemed incongruous with his rough-and-tumble bad-boy persona. But Wahlberg later appeared in movies that felt like nothing more than big, showy paydays (Planet of the Apes, to name one) and he lost a bit of credibility. In The Lovely Bones, Wahlberg is achingly believable as the emotionally gutted Jack Salmon. He allows every emotion to bubble up to the surface as he falls apart, then realizes his only salvation is find Susie's murderer. Wahlberg captures the uniquely special magic that occurs when a father thinks the sun rises and sets upon his daughter.
Peter Jackson was tasked with the difficult job of directing a story where there is no hyped-up revenge scene. Susie's surreal afterlife is interspersed with the real-life reality of crime. People are brutalized every day, and more often than not, the perpetrator goes free. As humans, we want justice for the victims, and usually it's fine with us if that justice is as vicious (or more so) than the crime itself. I marvel at the parents of a slain child who forgive the child's murderer. How can they do it? More to the point, what the hell is wrong with these people? My Comment is about forgoing the thirst for revenge, and how hard it is. Throughout my life, I have always kept a secret chamber in my consciousness for those who have hurt me or my family. After a time has passed, I will always be cordial and polite to these people, but I will never forget their actions. Nor will I ever really forgive them. I also know that sub-consciously, I want bad things to happen to them. Lately I've felt that all of this latent anger is really getting me nowhere. I waste too much time on it and it prevents me from thinking about other things I'd rather be thinking about. However, no one in my family has ever befallen a fate so horrible as Susie Salmon's. So, I just don't know if I could ever get to a place of forgiveness were I to experience so heinous a crime. The Lovely Bones gives us that question to ponder and does a masterful job of it.

It's Complicated

I once read a review of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic in which the reviewer claimed that Anderson created not films, but worlds. This was no doubt due to the almost pathologically quirky characters Anderson places in seemingly foreign locales. Anderson's characters all display a knowledge of these worlds, never questioning their existence or functionality.
Filmmaker Nancy Meyers creates worlds for her characters as well, albeit less esoteric. Meyers' worlds are moneyed, tasteful and hyper-educated. Her characters (particularly the women) are smart, attractive and most importantly, empathetic. Somehow, Meyers manages have you rooting for her heroes and heroines, despite the fact that they have more advantages than they know what to do with. It's Complicated is no exception, with it's glossy Santa Barbara setting and psychologically savvy singles. Meryl Streep is Jane, a fifty-ish bakery owner who has been divorced from Jake (Alec Baldwin) for ten years. After being left by him for the proverbial younger woman (blandly played by Lake Bell. Tangentially, how dumb is that name?), Jane evolves into a woman comfortable with being alone. That is, until she falls back into bed with her ex in a drunken torrent. She and Jake begin a torrid affair which leaves Jane fraught with guilt and confusion. Streep plays Jane magnificently, as she does every single role she has ever tackled. Seriously. I know there are critics who find Streep too technical in her approach, but they are either suffering from crippling envy or have been denied entry into art school by someone who looks exactly like Streep.
We see Jane glow in the embers of naughty, verboten sex with her former husband. She is ambivalent, sure, cagey and defiant all at the same time. Streep also delivers the comfortable joy she has been displaying more readily in her last few roles. Conversely, Baldwin disappoints. After Baldwin realized his beefcake status was hell and gone from Cartegena, he began to deliver some of the funniest television performances since Milton Berle donned a dress. But in this film, Baldwin mugs and minces and looks to be enjoying chewing scenery more than food. For Baldwin, that's saying something. It feels as if Baldwin was so flummoxed by acting with Streep that he hides behind a smug persona rather than really going deeply into the character of Jake.
The overriding feeling one gets while watching one of Meyers films is that she is a pro. A notorious perfectionist, Meyers involves herself in every detail of making a picture. While this creates a very uniform feel, it can occasionally render a movie over-produced and slick. Meyers is still a phenom, being the only female hyphenate in Hollywood who works continuously. This is a monumental feat, particularly in an industry that feels that the only demographic worth targeting is the 14 to 24-year-old male. My Comment has to do with the pervasive attitude in Hollywood that the only bankable stories are the ones about men. I have been told dozens of times to simply change my female lead characters to males if I want to have any shot at selling a script. Across the board, agents, producers and heads of production want nothing to do with a script that has a female lead because women can't pull in as much as the box office as men. What about Juno, you say? The studio greenlit Juno because it only cost 7 million dollars to make, thus, they didn't have to put Angelina Jolie (the most expensive but also most bankable female star today) in it in order to insure that people would show up. When Juno grossed more that 230 million dollars worldwide, one would think that the powers that be would open their minds about female-driven scripts. Not so.
So now that Nancy Meyers has directed a film with a 60+ female lead that has grossed 99 million dollars worldwide, will you boys listen to me roar a bit?