Directed by Peter Jackson
(PG-13)
**
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A murdered girl watches over her family from the afterlife.
This adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-seller, The Lovely Bones, “trades soul for spectacle,” said David Germain in the Associated Press. Irish actress Saoirse Ronan plays a 14-year-old who is raped and murdered and then watches over her family from afar. Sebold’s novel about a soul lamenting a life never lived and a family racked with grief was delicately told, and thus always seemed an odd choice for a director best known for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Peter Jackson is clearly still stuck in fantasyland, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Sebold wove a tale that was at once “warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister, and science-fiction fantastical,” but Jackson emphasizes the latter two, leaving no room for emotion. He also spends too much time on the murderer, played by Stanley Tucci, and the film plays like a thriller. As unsettling a performance as Tucci gives, The Lovely Bones isn’t his story, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Sebold’s intricate narrative not only addressed the “urges of bodies on earth,” but also soared to take in the “lightness of souls in heaven.” Jackson, on the other hand, “forfeits depth for safe, surface” storytelling and special effects.
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