'The Lovely Bones': Director Peter Jackson overburdens Alice Sebold's delicate novel

Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" is one of those books so beautifully written its words seem to float, shimmering in the calm, mysterious world the author creates. It is narrated, audaciously, by a dead child: Susie Salmon, a young teen murdered on her way home from school on a cold December day in 1973. From heaven, she watches her family as the years go by, sometimes even interacting with them, rejoicing when they hear her. "The truth was," she tells us, "that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred."

There was no reason to make this book into a film — and many reasons not to — so you have to admire Peter Jackson for trying. Unfortunately, he's the wrong director for the job.

The Peter Jackson who made "Heavenly Creatures" 15 years ago might have been the right one; this is an intimate story that takes place mostly in its character's heads. Instead, the Peter Jackson who made "Lord of the Rings" has taken hold, drowning this delicate tale in elaborate CGI. The heaven (or, rather, the "in-between") in which Susie resides here looks sort of like Middle-earth, sort of like a very expensive inspirational greeting card, a bit like a '70s concert poster featuring psychedelic butterflies, and nothing whatsoever like anything the book makes you think of.

And Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens can't solve a key problem in translating this work to film: We need to watch, as an essential plot point, a child being murdered. Though they've softened the scene (it's clear in the book that Susie is raped, but not at all in the movie), it's still unbearable.

By the time it occurs — a fair bit into the movie, rather than in the book where it happens in the opening pages — we've become attached to young Susie (Saoirse Ronan), and the scene is so upsetting "The Lovely Bones" never recovers.

Ronan does remarkable work in the film, and almost makes the whole thing work despite itself. Her impish, watchful face takes in everything around her; you can almost see her (as in "Atonement") growing up before our eyes. Her narration has a sweet calmness, and you realize with a start that this character who's dead is the most alive presence in the film.

Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz have a few effective moments as Susie's grieving parents, but aren't given enough screen time to register as characters; Susan Sarandon's boozy comic-relief grandma seems to have wandered in from a different movie. An unrecognizable Stanley Tucci is haunting — though you can barely stand to look at him — as Susie's murderer.

At times Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" feels like a murder mystery, except there's no mystery here — we know from the start who killed Susie, so the emphasis on the investigation seems oddly out of place.

Much of the film plays like a missed opportunity to tell the book's story of family, love and remembrance; about, as Susie tells us in the book, "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."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com