The girl is Susie Salmon (“like the fish,” she says), who is beautifully played by Saoirse Ronan (who was so good in Atonement) with a careful measure of gently scrubbed naïveté and wide-eyed juvenile longings that remain steadfastly grounded, rather than sticky and saccharine. She is an innocent in whom we can truly believe (her two main desires in life are to be a wildlife photographer and to kiss the dreamy British student in her English class), which makes her ghastly murder (kept entirely off screen, which is not the case in the book) by her serial-killer neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) all the more shocking. The death of a child always carries with it a special charge that forces us to acknowledge the horrors of the world, and the miracle of Sebold’s novel is that she managed to wring such tenderness and even humor out of such a horrible scenario.

Jackson comes close at times to pulling off the same feat, partially because he deals so well with the scenes in which Susie’s family deals with her disappearance. Susie’s father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) alternates between extreme grief and an overdetermined zeal to discover the killer’s identity; her mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) goes numb and eventually takes off for California, leaving her boozy mother (Susan Sarandon) to hold things together; and Susie’s younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) tries desperately to forge her own identity in the vacuum left behind, but ultimately finds herself drawn into the mystery. Thus, much of the film is split between family drama and a kind of horror thriller in which we know the monster’s identity, but are left in suspense as to when (if ever) anyone else will see beneath his placid mask (Tucci, who last played Julia Child’s ever-patient and loving husband in Julie & Julia, is superbly creepy and unnerving).

All of this is narrated by Susie, who watches the proceedings from an interstitial netherworld knows as “The In-Between,” in which souls temporarily hover on their way to heaven. There is an inherent poignancy in Susie’s ability to watch her family cope with her loss; it is at once the ultimate, ever-soothing verification of being loved that we all (especially as teenagers) secretly wish for and at the same time a tragic separation, as she can see but not influence (except by briefly making her presence known to those who are able to see). Ronan’s voice is sweet and girlish and slightly otherworldly, and her narration works the juxtaposition between her earthly innocence and her supernatural omnipresence into something powerfully moving--the true transcendence of the worldly.

Yet, it is in visually transcending the worldly that The Lovely Bones comes across its biggest stumbling blocks. Any film set in heaven is always going to be a challenge because we all have our own vision of what it will be like, and no two are ever the same. There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of years of kitschy, cheesy, and otherwise insufferable images that have been used to envision that which, by definition, is outside the bounds of the human imagination, all of which must be avoided. Thus, Jackson finds himself having to literalize what was left tantalizing vague (and therefore up to the individual reader’s own mind’s eye) in the book, and the result is sometimes charming, a bit humorous, but mostly disastrous. With all the wonders of CGI at his disposal, Jackson gives us an afterlife of swirling colors and shifting landscapes, all of which is presented with a slightly surreal vibe that is more bad acid trip than beautiful hereafter.

Perhaps Jackson was inspired by the period in which the film takes place, which his production designers evoke with great detail and attention, but Susie’s in-between makes us feel like we’re trapped inside a lava lamp. Early in the film Susie remembers a moment in her childhood when she worried about a penguin inside a snow globe and her father reassured her that the penguin was okay because he was “trapped in a perfect world.” The juxtaposition of entrapment and perfection are important thematic strands in the story, as it is filled with characters who are trapped both literally (Susie in the underground lair George constructed to snare her, Lindsey trapped in George’s bedroom trying to find evidence against him) and psychologically (Susie’s parents trapped in their own disparate forms of grief that are destined to drive them apart, George trapped inside the mechanical horrors of his own twisted mind). At the same time, though, the story promises an ultimate escape to an afterlife of perfection, and one wonders if the film might have better evoked that perfection by finding a way to leave it up to each viewer to imagine, rather than trying to imagine it for them.

Overall Rating: (2.5)

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