Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, from 1994, was about two young girls who become psychologically driven to commit murder, and who take refuge in an elaborate fantasy world. Now, with his defanged adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller The Lovely Bones – which softens and omits its nastier elements – it is as if Jackson has taken the spirit of Heavenly Creatures and turned it inside out, or upside down. Instead of a compelling nightmare, he has created a bland, girly-sparkly dream. It is a soothing, pseudo-redemptive fantasy which imagines that the teenage victim of a serial killer lives on, looking caringly over the lives left behind, in a weird but lovely-looking limbo, while the nearest and dearest can't get over the death. And then, once the living have got closure, she becomes united with the other victims, skipping hand in hand through a wonderful heaven which looks like a gorgeous meadow. (And the serial killer? When he dies? Well, I guess he gets to go to a different, less nice meadow. Or maybe the movie believes in hell – but can't quite bring itself to say so.)
It's certainly a startling story: a bold mix of horrible and sickly-sweet in a ratio of one to eight. Saoirse Ronan plays Susie Salmon, a teenage girl in the 1970s who is murdered by a local creepo, played by Stanley Tucci. Her spirit lives on, running desperately through the streets after the initial assault, unable at first to grasp that she is dead, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Then she has chilling visions of her murderer slumped in his bath, brooding and gloating over his horrendous crime. Susie's spirit visits her family and sees how the marriage of her parents has been all but destroyed. But Susie the ghost has gained a kind of sweetness, an ineffable insight and wisdom into the hurly-burly of human affairs, and sees what the living cannot – that everything will kind of be OK in the end.
Like gloopy bestsellers in WH Smith, this movie should come with its own free giant-sized bar of Galaxy chocolate. Saoirse Ronan certainly gives a game performance as Susie, and as you would expect from a Peter Jackson film, the fantasy images are strikingly designed. But everything else? Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are the implausibly great-looking and decent mum and dad, and Susan Sarandon is the lovable, cigarette-smoking, tippling character of a grandmother. They are all entirely phoney. And there is something fundamentally dishonest about the film, in the way it shows Susie's family coming to terms with the loss in what is frankly double-quick time, in cosmic parallel to Susie finding her pals in heaven. As to whether The Lovely Bones gives an accurate picture of the afterlife … well, who can say? But in this world, the victims' loved ones never entirely get over the crime – at least not in the picturesque way these people do. Surely that's the unlovely truth.
