Like James Cameron, Peter Jackson has reached the point in his career where he can make just about whatever he pleases. Coming off of King Kong (rating: 85) and the failed negotiations for him to direct The Hobbit, this project seemed like a strange sideways turn: a bestselling book about a teenager who gets murdered by a serial killing neighbor, then tries to cope with the afterlife as her family tries to cope with her death. The subject matter is as emotionally fraught as it is macabre, and a very different palette than he worked with in his grand epics -- and, frankly, he isn't able to find the right tone. His grand style, consisting of beautiful cinematography, a lot of sweeping musical cues and meaningful slow-motion, works better for a great ape battling a dinosaur than for this film's more intimate family setting. It's about 40 minutes too long, and much of that length could have been made up by simply eliminating all the elegiac slow-motion.
Jackson has had a bizarre, remarkable career, going from low-budget comedy-horror to $300 million blockbusters in little over a decade. From 2001 to 2005, he directed four straight three-hour epics, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (ratings: 91, 91, and 93) and his King Kong remake. He hasn't made a lot of original stories: Heavenly Creatures (rating: 90) is based on a true story, Lord of the Rings and The Lovely Bones are book adaptations, and King Kong's a remake. The movie this resembles most, of course, is the remarkable Heavenly Creatures, about two 13-year old New Zealand girls who conspire to kill the mother of one of them. However, it works because it's gleefully lurid rather than stately reverent. It's frequently hilarious, disturbing, intoxicating; it's also 35 minutes shorter. This film is scarier, particularly in the frightening inevitability of the first part of the film leading up to the main character's murder, but after the girl dies, the film diffuses, loses momentum and ultimately stalls. It would have been well served by the stylistic anarchy of Heavenly Creatures.
The movie is basically split into the world of the living and the world of the dead. Though that's one of Tim Burton's pet themes, the two movies that it reminded me of most strongly are What Dreams May Come (rating: 61), for its watercolor Heaven, and What Lies Beneath (rating: 73), for its suburban murder drama. What Dreams May Come was a beautiful but deeply overserious meditation on the personal nature of heaven and hell, by Peter Jackson's countryman Vincent Ward. It may be in the nature of heaven that a movie whose timeline is set before and after death will seem to have lost its momentum once death has come -- the afterlife, for all our musings, has never seemed nearly as tangible or interesting as the real world. (Tim Burton's lands of the dead are emphatically not heaven.)
The casting is a mixed bag. Saoirse Ronan is wonderful as Susie Salmon, the dead girl, with a miraculously expressive face. Stanley Tucci is deeply unsettling as her killer. But Mark Wahlberg is simply not a good enough actor to play Susie's father, and in his hands the depths of a father's anguish is reduced to a series of paranoid tics and ravings. Susan Sarandon is enjoyable as the comic relief, the alcoholic grandmother who sweeps in to hold the family together but doesn't really have the wherewithal. Rose McIver does a nice job as Susie's younger sister Lindsey; Nikki SooHoo, sporting a bizarrely intermittent accent, detracts from her scenes as Susie's guide to the afterlife. Altogether, none of them is able to kickstart the film's momentum.
Peter Jackson made half of a good movie and half of bad one. Individual shots are brilliant -- the connection between Susie and her highs school crush, Ray; the menacing last few moments of Susie's life with Tucci -- even while the rest of the movie unwieldily sags. Jackson's at the point in his career where he gets to make exactly the movie he wants to make, mistakes and all. But his vision and eye are striking enough that even his misfires are worth seeing.
Rating: 49(Note: this rating has been changed. The original review had a 59 rating.)
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Saoirse Ronan is really interesting -- amazing eyes -- she's got a future for sure.