Jackson’s interest in the “in-between,” as this suburb of heaven is called, is primarily visual. “Heaven,” a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is “a place where nothing ever happens.”Īccordingly Mr. It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. Susie’s unearthly home, in the book a minimally sketched, nondenominational purgatory where the dead loiter on their way to heaven and keep tabs on unfinished business down on earth, has been expanded into a digitally rendered Wonderland of rioting metaphors, crystal seas and floating topiary.
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Jackson’s film, from a script he wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his frequent collaborators, shows less audacity and too much art. The novel is conceived with enough audacity to make this gimmick intriguing, and executed with enough art to make it effective. She makes the victim, a daughter of ’70s suburbia named Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), an omniscient, beyond-the-grave narrator, with a lively voice and a comfortable perch in the afterlife from which to survey the doings of her family, her friends and the neighbor who killed her. Sebold pushes the dead-child narrative to an emotional extreme, and at the same time undermines its exploitive tendencies, by means of a simple and radical formal device. In spite of the horrific act at the center of the story the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl the novel is not depressing or assaultive but rather, somewhat perversely, warm, hopeful and even occasionally funny. “The Lovely Bones,” Alice Sebold’s 2002 best seller, now a film directed by Peter Jackson, stands out as a singularly bold and complex treatment of this grim and apparently inexhaustible theme.
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This is hardly news (Charles Dickens made a nice living trafficking in the suffering of minors), but for some reason the past decade has seen an epidemic of cinematic and literary crimes against the young. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril. We all like children, and at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama we seem to like them best when they’re abused, endangered or dead.