Article By: Shoshana Akins
When Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones hit the bookstands five years ago, it shook worlds with its horrifyingly honest tale of a young girl’s murder. A shocking rape scene, the intimate portrayal of a devastated family, and a beautiful new look at the afterlife, came together to create a phenomenal story everyone was raving about.
This coming January, this story will be translated from paper to the silver screen with Peter Jackson’s movie adaption of the same name, The Lovely Bones (Paramount Pictures, 2009).
The film has already premiered in London and is set for a limited opening in the United States this coming Friday, and has come out among a whirlwind of reviews. Some are already calling it a top Oscar contender. But many others believe that Jackson, whose affinity for CGI and special effects can be clearly seen in his past blockbusters, has destroyed a beautiful and entertaining narrative with his blue screen-infused, overwhelmingly digital recreation.
Stirring around with all these remarks are the reviews of Saoirse Ronan, the young actress who plays the lead, Susie Salmon, in Bones. Her debut and Oscar-nominated performance in Atonement at the age of 13 immediately shot her into the spotlight and built up high hopes for her future career. Can she continue her popularity in the Oscar queue, or will this be the end of the road?
To Ronan, the nominations and the reviews of the movie do not matter. What is most important is that she is proud of what she made, and hopes everyone appreciates the narrative as a new creation.
“To be honest, I try not to think about award season at all, especially when it concerns a movie that I’ve made,” commented Ronan to the Journal. “I just really hope that everyone enjoys it, that they connect to it as much as they did with the book. So, if awards come as well, then that’s brilliant!”
Dark roles are a comfortable place for Ronan due to her past experience in other films, but dealing with a blue screen, especially working with the amounts that Jackson calls for, is a completely different story. The most CGI-heavy scenes are also of the most anticipated recreated images of the book: the idea of Heaven. For Susie, the afterlife is an amalgamation of what was, is, and could be. All the possibilities of her life and death are laid out for her, forcing her to make a choice if she wants to always be looking in the past, or go on to explore what else is out there.
“It was kind of surreal at first, because it was all blue screen, and I hadn’t worked with that much blue screen before, and most of Heaven was going to be put in afterwards,” explained Ronan. “It was sometimes difficult to try and imagine what it was going to be like, what it was going to look like. But I saw the movie a few days ago and it was a lovely surprise to finally see Heaven.”
Though the movie and the book are said to be two separate works, early viewers were outraged that the supremely significant and monumental rape scene had been entirely taken out of the movie. This was the whole reason Sebold’s book was so controversial and so moving, yet the scene is nowhere to be seen. To Ronan, this is a benefit rather than a loss and adds a new creative aspect to the film.
“I don’t think it changes it at all, really. I think if anything, it makes it stronger because I think it’s kind of the easy route to put that kind of scene in. It can make people uncomfortable,” said Ronan. “I find that if they do it the way that we did in The Lovely Bones, it… just leaves it up to the audience’s imagination, and lets them think of it for themselves and that can even be stronger.”
But in the end, what really matters is the movie’s reception during the opening week. Though Paramount moved the nationwide premier back from its December debut (presumably to make room for the surprisingly successful movie Up in the Air) the official date is now set to be Jan. 15, 2010 and looks to be an interesting, or at least controversial, night at that movies.
