The dowdy everyman seems harmless enough, so it is that young Susie agrees to accompany him to see his newly installed underground playroom, and she doesn’t get 'the skeevies" until it’s too late to escape.
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Jackson belabours the point that Stanley Tucci’s blonde, bland Mr Harvey embodies that malevolent 'ordinariness’ that makes serial killers so elusive. Pity then, it takes him two years to join the dots, in the first of many dubious U-turns in the adaptation. He defends his painstaking pursuit, suggesting that 'hobbies are healthy they teach you things" – the inference being of course, that his meticulous nature will pay dividends later, in the hunt for Susie’s killer (Stanley Tucci). Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) is a number cruncher by day, and he hoists miniature ships in bottles by night with his beloved daughter, 14 year-old Susie (Saorise Ronan). seem fixated by the prospect of Susie’s killer getting his comeuppance, at the expense of all other elements of the story. and worse, tart it up with gaudy supernatural visuals. Inexplicably, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens have opted to reduce a complex narrative about intimacy, family, and grief, into a redundant crime and punishment thriller. Fair enough, but after emerging (gratefully) from the exhaustive 135-minute film, one wonders exactly who the director thought would appreciate such an overwrought slice of conventionality. In short, it seemed that all of the elements were in place for the perfect pairing of source text and storyteller.įrom the outset Jackson has said that his interpretation of The Lovely Bones won’t please everyone, especially not die-hard fans of the book. He thrives on alternate realities, and with a personal army of in-house effects wizards, his breakthrough films were lavish renditions, kept grounded by clever story and well-realised character think how spectacularly the murderous teens of his Heavenly Creatures conspired against the world from their private universe remember how convincing Michael J Fox was, as a conduit between this world and the next, in the kooky and spooky The Frighteners? Secondly, The Lovely Bones is an otherworldly tale, and Peter Jackson has otherworldliness for breakfast. For starters, he and his cohorts (Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) are no strangers to adaptation – prior to their Oscar-winning Tolkein adaptation, he and Walsh were nominated for reinventing Pauline Parker’s diaries as the Heavenly Creatures screenplay. As a best-selling story of loss, renewal and the minutiae of life, its big screen adaptation was inevitable, and so it came as no surprise that Jackson put his hand up to do the honours.
Of this Peter Jackson would have been well aware, when he signed on to adapt and direct The Lovely Bones.Īlice Sebold’s genre-defying tome is narrated by a teenage murder victim, Susie Salmon, as she watches over her fractured family and keeps tabs on her killer, from an ethereal pergola. Yet take too many liberties with the defining elements of the novel, or fail to articulate the writer’s prose, and you’ll have to answer to more than just the howls of protest from the sniping 'the book was better’ crowd. Adhere to the source text too slavishly, or rely too heavily on voice over, and you’ll end up with little more than the live-action equivalent of a book on tape. The film demonstrated that the pitfalls of adaptation are many and varied. In their acerbic tale of a screenwriter dwarfed by the enormity of the task before him, Adaptation’s complex and clever plot encapsulated like no other, the means by which outstanding books can turn into lousy screenplays.
It has been ten years since Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman’s mythical brother Donald created the quintessential film about the perils of adaptation.
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