Bonehead

just as pundits compile assessments of the millennium's first movie decade, the lovely bones arrives to remind them that peter jackson perpetrated the biggest goof in millennial history: the lord of the rings trilogy. like each of those over-scaled, unintelligible, miraculously over-hyped fantasy films, the lovely bones demonstrates geek sensibility run amok. jackson applies his interest in feverish imaginings to the already histrionic conceit of alice sebold's best-selling novel. and as with j.r.r. tolkien's intricate, philosophical epic, jackson flattens sebold's sensitive, sometimes dubious, ideas about girlhood, nostalgia and death into more elfish nonsense.

jackson takes sebold's premise-a posthumous lament by 14-year-old susie salmon (saoirse ronan), a victim of a serial killer in 1973-and once again pushes all the cgi buttons. his digital metaphysics include susie's hindsight nostalgia about her suburban parents (mark wahlberg, rachel weisz) and her strange next-door neighbor (stanley tucci). not much interested in the details of family life or puberty, jackson over-stylizes a ghost story-creating convoluted panoramas of susie watching her death and police investigation and family disintegration from the other side. slipping past sebold's quondam feminist protest (briefly glimpsing germaine greer's the female eunuch, for example), jackson goes to the edge of lurid sentimentality.

piled on dreamscapes and apparitions are part of jackson's juvenile taste, but it's also what made his 1994 bizarro-feminist serial killer fantasy heavenly creatures so distasteful. he mixes real-life horror with comic-book sensationalism. when little susie joins a heavenly chorus of other dead-girl victims (the lovely bones), jackson never appropriately measures the distance between childhood naiveté and real-world danger. that's what distinguished bernard rose's similar but surrealistic 1988 paperhouse. jackson just ratchets up the f/x-as in the damn lotr trilogy. even his short-shrift characterizations depend on whimsical clichés, whether susie's blue-eyed innocence or tucci's psychopathic ned flanders with nautilis-ized buttocks, surely an oscar-worthy routine.

jackson's penchant for monsters and the supernatural results in repeated pop misfires: from susie's pointless telepathic communication with a breakfast club-style goth girl to a detective's (michael imperioli) zodiac-style futility. he even curtails the drama of susie's resourceful younger sister lindsey (rose mciver), a silence of the lambs rip-off. morbid geek that he is, jackson also gets the music cues wrong: his climax uses that kitschy, 1980s brit-pop dirge "song to the siren" by this mortal coil. it proves jackson's fraudulence because blue oyster cult's "(don't fear) the reaper" or warren zevon's "excitable boy"-the '70s update of the everly brothers' "wake up little susie"-would have been chronologically correct and could rectify the film's absurd mixture of cheap melancholy (susie's empty bedroom), regret (susie's unconsummated schoolgirl crush) and fantasy escapism. jackson treats death and grief as a dungeons and dragons funhouse. the lovely bones is for morbid nerds.

-- the lovely bones directed by peter jackson runtime: 135 min.