Review | The Lovely Bones
Credit: Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
OPENS FRIDAY 12/11
After a teen (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered, she looks down from heaven at the promising life she could have had, while her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) try to go on living. Largely faithful to Alice Sebold's novel, the repulsive yet redemptive story is harrowing on screen and well-acted. One big weakness: Director Peter Jackson's visions of heaven feel like a My Little Pony version of Lord of the Rings.
-- THELMA ADAMS
Tell Us What You Think
2First, the book. I still think Alice Sebold is a bold and wonderful writer, but her work did not carry the same weight in the end as it started in the beginning. The idea of writing from afterlife should be suspenseful and powerful, in which case I think its much debated comparison, Forgiving Ararat by Gita Nazareth, to fare better in terms of quality and the flow of plots. Movie-wise, it deteriorates further. The big ideas that were present in the book, albeit poorly constructed, were altogether absent from the movie. If you only care for a plethora of CGI, then by all means go watch the movie. But if you're after something deeper and more substantial, well... choose another book to read.
This review and others disappoint me, as I really loved this book and am looking forward to seeing someone else's visual interpretation of it. The Lovely Bones was such a mesmerizing book I didn't want it to end. Skirting the borderlands between human reality and the imagined wonders of heaven, I felt I had been introduced to a world both startlingly tangible yet ethereal all the same. Since then, I have been looking for further excursions into the afterworld, but I haven't found much, until now. Recently I read Gita Nazareth's Forgiving Ararat. This book too explores the interconnections between the land of the living and the land of the dead. As a publicist and a fan of this book, I'm interested to see what parallels are drawn between the two.