The book on which The Lovely Bones is based presented "the ultimate puzzle for screenwriters", according to the film's director, Peter Jackson. Apparently he asked himself: "How do you take Alice Sebold's very intricate, poetic book which doesn't in any way scream 'I'm a movie' and structure it as a film?"
By common consent, he got the answer wrong. Yet the clue to the puzzle was no further away than the title. Towards the end of the novel, the eponymous bones are defined as "the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent" that took shape among the bereaved after the murder of its young narrator, Susie. In spite of its otherworldly accoutrements, this is a story about life, not death.
Sebold's take on the grieving process didn't impress everyone. Nonetheless, the circumstances she evoked offered plenty of scope for a compelling adaptation. The twists and turns of the survivors' personal journeys could surely have enthralled. Susie might have been allowed to provide an off-screen commentary on their progress. Nonetheless, this should have been a thoroughly earthbound film.
Instead, all we get of the dynamics of bereavement is crude caricature. Susie's father is a boring paragon of worthiness. Her mother leaves home, then she comes back. We're given little idea of what exactly she's going through. In the book, she has an affair with the detective on the case. The film doesn't seem to have room for this; it has other preoccupations.
Sebold leaves Susie's temporary spiritual abode largely to the imagination. This is just as well, since neither its character nor its function invites scrutiny. In the film, on the other hand, it's the In-Between that dominates the proceedings. What goes on in its luridly kitsch expanses gets us nowhere very much, but it vitiates the sublunary action that's what actually matters.
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Yet Jackson was no hired hand executing the witless will of dumb studio bosses. He co-wrote his own screenplay for The Lovely Bones before persuading DreamWorks to produce it. He may have shown a taste for visual excess in The Return of the King and King Kong, but Heavenly Creatures showed human complexity to be well within his grasp. So why did he approach Sebold's book in the way he did?
The answer, it has to be assumed, is that he thought a mere human story just wouldn't cut it in the multiplexes. "Intricate" and "poetic" weren't good enough for a big-time film. It had to scream "I'm a movie". It's understandable that with his background he reached for spectacle as a way of achieving this. However, once it became clear that this wouldn't be enough, he seems to have cast around for other reassuring crutches from cinema's bag of tried and tested tricks, thereby making things even worse. Thus, the film tries to be a serial-killer detective story and a revenge thriller as well as a weepie and a ghost story. Then, as if all that wasn't enough, Susan Sarandon throws in a comic turn.
None of the elements in the resulting hodgepodge can begin to save the day, but you can see how they might have got there. These days, whatever its source material, mainstream cinema seems expected to be "cinematic". A human story just isn't considered enough. Sadly, cinemagoers' preferences, as reflected in box-office returns, appear to bear this out. All the same, this could have been an opportunity to try and widen those preferences.
Mass-market book publishing is, like the movies, a formulaic and repetitive business. Sebold came to it with something genuinely different. She was lucky to get her book published, and when she did, no one expected it to get anywhere. In fact, The Lovely Bones sold over 2m hardback copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.
Jackson doubtless hoped for a similar breakthrough. Perhaps, if he'd stayed truer to the essence of the book, he would have got one. Perhaps, of course, he wouldn't have. It's a pity we'll never know.
