26 February 2010
	CINEMA A view from the afterlife By Peter Wilhelm This dark story is part of a cinema movement to break the boundaries of realism

"I was 14 when I was murdered " That's the second line of Alice Sebold's best-selling novel about the death of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of a serial killer. It goes on from there: poised in a luminous limbo, Suzie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) looks out upon the world and sees the aftermath of her murder, the destruction and eventual reconciliation of her family, the drift to soulless extinction of the empty-eyed predator. This narration from a near-heaven is bold. Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan It might also be seen as offering comfort where there is none, though some fundamentalists found the victim's "heaven" curiously vacant: no God, no Jesus, Suzie's afterlife peopled solely by other female victims of the killer (Stanley Tucci), whom we frequently see plotting in evil solitude. In an overlong film, Peter Jackson - the guiding hand of The Lord of the Rings trilogy - takes time and care over this strange universe. Vivid colours, an almost 3-D vision, flowing landscapes: these are the girl's new matrix from which she must break free and move on - to what appears to be a Buddhist nirvana, accompanied by another child, played by Nikki SooHoo. Ronan (we saw her in Atonement) is a fresh star. As her parents, Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are depressed and vacant, while her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) flits about reliving her youth through drink, drugs and rock, but is not actually much use. As an investigating cop, Michael Imperioli seems oddly impercipient. Only when Suzie's sister (Rose McIver) becomes Tucci's target does the plot draw towards closure. Imperioli suggests a gentleness which matches Ronan's innocence and appalling yearning for the kiss she never had - one granted in a curiously contrived manner. Otherwise, Jackson luxuriates in his portrait of an afterlife which can be chilling. In one extended scene, Suzie ventures into a dark, haunted structure that appears to be the killer's mind - a form of installation art - and discovers a fuller, horrifying truth. A criticism of this film has been that Jackson skimps the details of Suzie's death. She is not raped onscreen - as is perhaps necessary if we are to feel the violation. Yet at times the director strays oddly into teen romance territory, which the book - which spent a year at the top of The New York Times bestseller list - avoided. Would that have made the tale too desolating? Which returns us to "heaven". Suzie's narration, interwoven into the narrative, is fairly faithfully followed by Jackson. It is a little girl's awestruck place: "The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air... [A] figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus." This alien place (as preternatural as any sense of unreality in the objective world) is also profoundly confining. It is not a permanent habitat, though there are allusions to a Dantesque cosmology that could include Hell. Suzie is stuck; her family are stuck; and even the murderer is stuck until some kind of cycle is complete. This raises the question: by placing moral judgment in the eye of eternity, is the writer (and Jackson) avoiding the pertinent moral issue, which may thus be reduced to a police matter? For all that, The Lovely Bones is intriguing. Breaking the boundaries of realism is evidently where world cinema is headed - perhaps belatedly, given the European masters. But moving it is. The Lovely Bones Directed by Peter Jackson Lead roles: Saoirse Ronan Rachel Weisz Mark Wahlberg Susan Sarandon Michael Imperioli Rose McIver Stanley Tucci