Dear middle America,

As you peruse your local movie listings this Martin Luther King Day weekend, you may find yourself considering Peter Jackson's THE LOVELY BONES, which opens in 'wide release' (your neck of the woods,) after over a month of 'limited release' (elite coastal movie theaters.) Red Staters, we've never really seen eye to eye. You probably think I'm a homosexual just for having a blog. But in the spirit of bipartisanship, nah, hell, call it patriotism, I'm warning y'all: Stay away from these LOVELY BONES.

Here, for your entertainment, is an awful mess. It's the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan,) a fourteen year-old girl murdered on her way home from school. Following her death, Susie tours "the in-between," a region neither heaven nor hell (though for me it was decidedly on the 'hell' side,) all while trying to communicate with her grieving parents Mark Wahlberg & Rachel Weisz, and help them solve the mystery of her death at the hands of the Salmon's next-door serial kill-neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci.)

Though effectively half his film is devoted to Susie's experience in the afterlife, (an expansion of the source novel's narrative framing device,) Jackson establishes no rules or structure for this 'in-between' world, choosing instead to present it as a series of computer-generated hyper-pastorals through which Susie meanders... seeing things that really aren't amazing, and meeting characters such as perky Asian spirit guide "Holly Golightly" (Nikki SooHoo)... who really isn't interesting.

Some badly needed suspense arrives in the last act, with Susie's sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) creeping through Harvey's home in a scene not undone by its implausibility, but by its inconsequence. The evidence Lindsey retrieves has almost zero bearing in the plot. The same lax causality goes for much of THE LOVELY BONES. The efforts of Susie to alert her family to her killer, eventually, go nowhere; Harvey's final comeuppance has barely anything to do with her plot line. This makes Susie, and her parents, not to mention Michael Imperioli's pointless police detective, ultimately impotent figures - and given how much screen time is allotted to Harvey and his devilry, it's hard to have sympathy for protagonists who are so banally bereaved they can't see a monster in their midst.

Between the sixteen endings of RETURN OF THE KING, and the 790-minute Empire State Building climax of KING KONG, it's fair to say that extended death scenes have become Peter Jackson's forté. I'm a sucker for his KONG - but the scene of Susie Salmon's abduction and murder is hard to classify as entertainment. And yet THE LOVELY BONES is not a bad film because of objectionable subject matter. It is a bad film because it's the sum of uniformly bad artistic choices:

The cinematography is a sloppy muddle, with cameras moving when they needn't and shouldn't, especially in domestic scenes. Sequences like the killer's introduction, peering through the windows of a dollhouse, are over-edited, where a simpler, cleaner presentation would do better. The musical score by Brian Eno is off the mark in almost every moment - most criminally, a 70's fabulous disco in heaven, set not to K.C. and the Sunshine Band, but to classical strings (AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS.) Worse still is Susie Salmon's ceaseless voice over. The post-mortem narrator's been done before, but it's hard to think of a more miscalculated application than this. Though Penn & Teller urge us to politely golf clap whenever the title of a film is worked into its dialogue, when Susie announces, apropos to nothing at film's end, "these are the lovely bones..." and then attempts to briefly unpack that statement, the only possible response is to groan - not clap.

Though Saoirse Ronan and the always-great Tucci both impress, the rest of the cast fails to leave any mark. Their jobs aren't made any easier by Mister Directorpants, who treats the Salmon clan as if each of them has to have one broad characteristic, like a surly dwarf or hungry Hobbit: Wahlberg's consumed by rage, Weisz is detached yet also aloof, and Susan Sarandon is the grandmother who's too fabulous to grieve, or even mention her granddaughter's murder. She causes hilaaarious havoc around the Salmon home: washing machines overflow, dishes shatter, small fires pop up. In such an aggressively sentimental film, that this MR. MOM-esque montage passes for comic relief shows just how far Jackson has come from his bizarre beginnings.

But then, Peter Jackson hasn't attempted anything less than Huge in the last ten years of his life. And though it was one of the true cinematic treats of the '00's to see a filmmaker with oddball sensibilities and a taste for macabre do Huge right, Jackson's latest is a smaller, sadder tale, which he insists on Huge-ifying - with sweeping visuals but no eye for detail. He may be attempting a return from Middle, to regular Earth with THE LOVELY BONES, but when it comes to portraying reality, Jackson's a stranger in a strange land.

Review cross-posted at Steven Spielblog:

http://stevenspielblog.wordpress.com/