REVIEW: 'The Lovely Bones' Just Kind of Lie There

“My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973.”

After a limited theatrical run for what is likely to be a fruitless search for year-end award affection, director/co-writer Peter Jackson’s “Lovely Bones” finally goes wide in a couple thousand movie palaces today to in order to prove to every American that winning an Academy Award can turn an otherwise talented director into the very definition of tone deaf and self-indulgent.

Jackson’s film is a serious one dealing with big themes involving child murder and grief and justice and the afterlife. But incredibly, dropped right in the middle of all this harrowing drama, is a flat-out comedy montage straight out of a Chris Columbus movie that has Susan Sarandon’s grandmother-character fumbling and stumbling about like Uncle Buck with the household chores, including — yes! — an out-of-control washing machine. Better yet, it’s all set to a pop song.

Maybe the projectionist was having a laugh with a deleted scene from “Mr. Woodcock.” Regardless, it was the equivalent of a cinematic silver bullet. The movie never recovered.

The real tragedy is that the first hour is superb; an elegant, disturbing and tense spellbinder that sets the story pieces in place and delivers a mesmerizing vision of the first stop on your way to Heaven. And then, just when you feel like you’re in the safe hands of a mature storyteller, bloat sets in; heavy bloat, where the special effects are overblown, the character through-lines mishandled, and the two-hour twenty-minute runtime becomes its own kind of Purgatory.

The opening quote from the trailer tells much of the story. Saoirse Ronan is Susie and she lives a pleasant life in a pleasant Pennsylvania suburb circa 1973, with her accountant dad (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), older sister (Rose McIver) and younger brother. Susie’s murder is one of opportunity, nothing more, and it will eventually expose previously unseen relationship cracks in the family left behind. It also delivers into their life Homicide Detective Len Fenman (an underused Michael Imperioli).

What’s also frustrating is that Jackson shows a real flair for creating suspense, a talent that ends up completely wasted in the final messy eighty minutes. One of Alfred Hitchcock’s wickedly amusing skills was in his ability to make us root for the bad guy. Every once in a while, The Master chose a particular scene where he would put the audience in the antagonist’s shoes to twist our sympathies completely around and somehow accomplish the impossible: have us on the edge of our seats worried the killer might be discovered or caught. The Necktie Killer desperately prying his gold pin from the dead hand of his latest victim aboard that potato truck in “Frenzy,” is probably the best example. Jackson elicits the same audience emotions in a beautifully crafted scene involving a charm bracelet and dollhouse.

Unfortunately, fine moments like that simply can’t overcome the rest. There’s a truly terrible subplot involving the Wahlberg character’s obsession to find his daughter’s killer. Oddly, however, he’s not obsessed enough to have developed all the photographs she took right before her death. Instead, he chooses to do take a roll to the Foto-Mat once a month.

Gee, think that last one might pay off?

Maybe that kind of movie-ish plot-pointing worked better in Alice Sebold’s novel (haven’t read it). Or maybe I’ve simply seen too many movies and find that kind of pipe-lying entirely too obvious. The real problem is how contradictory and inconsistent the behavior is. We’re supposed to believe Dad would pull the tax records on his neighbors but wait a year for a look at the last photos his murdered child took? And aren’t there laws about withholding evidence from the police?

Like the hair that stands up on the back of the neck in “The Sixth Sense” and the sneezes in “Ghost Town,” “Lovely Bones” has an interesting idea as to how spirits/angels/ghosts touch the living. What you and I might call a hunch or instinct is in fact a willful push of sorts from beyond. You will find the film’s version of Heaven a little more Strawberry Fields than St. Peter, but there’s nothing that comes close to offensive and a strategically placed pair of earrings in the shape of a cross are appreciated.

The performances are uneven, but that’s the script’s fault, though seeing Mark Wahlberg as the father of a teenage daughter is asking a bit much. The real standout is Stanley Tucci. It’s like he’s in a movie all his own — only a good one. Truly, a dynamite performance that makes this worth a look on DVD.