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.