By Mary Whitfill
Staff Writer
“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.” Identical to the book, movie “The Lovely Bones” begins with this distinguished and abrupt proclamation, instantly capturing viewers into the world of 14-year-old Susie Salmon.
Originally a best selling Alice Sebold novel published in 2002, the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones is directed by Peter Jackson. Jackson personally purchased the rights and developed a script, which he later sold to DreamWorks, after which Paramount became the film’s distributor. The film was released Jan. 15 and by Jan. 19 had already made an estimated $21 million.
In 1973, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is coaxed into an underground club house built by her neighbor and murderer, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). Susie runs home to discover Harvey soaking in a bathtub of bloody water and soon realizes she has been murdered.
Her father, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg), has a particularly hard time coping with her death, and he and Susie’s sister Lindsey Salmon (Rose Mclver) soon become obsessive over Harvey, who they suspect is the killer.
After discovering Lindsey had been in his house, Harvey flees the city and is never found by investigators. Sometime later, Harvey meets a young woman and while attempting to coax her into his car, an icicle falls onto his shoulder, knocking him into a ravine, killing him.
Although the direct plot is dynamic and attention catching, there are parts of the movie that are set in a place outside of earth. All through the scheming, plotting and investigative actions of her family, Susie is watching from a purgatory type place, trying to cope with her own death. Towards the end, Susie sees Lindsey and her boyfriend are married and expecting a child, that her mother is now able to go into her room and that her family is healing. She observes these new relationships as “the lovely bones” that grew around her death.
“The Lovely Bones” is a new type of suspense movie. Although typical “who done it?” questions are already answered as the movie begins, it still manages to send a healthy dose of adrenaline through all audience members during the entire film.
The movie is defiantly worth the money for anyone who is in the mood for a terrific action/suspense movie. Plus, the acting jobs by all cast are incredible, particularly in Ronan, Tucci and Wahlberg.
I recommend going to see the film to anyone, but I would also warn you to keep it away from the younger viewers as it is rated PG-13. I read the book, and was still appropriately freaked out for the entire show. Although I wouldn’t place it in the category of “horror movie” it’s far from being the feel good film of the year.
“The Lovely Bones” has been nominated for many awards, mostly for Tucci’s performance, including Best Supporting Actor at the 82nd Academy Awards and Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture at the 67th Golden Globe Awards.
I feel that the only way to end this would be as Sebold originally felt it should end with the publishing of the novel.
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.”
