amabili resti

27/30

This one's got nothing to do with American Beauty - although the fatal ending is immediately announced at the very beginning of the film - but neither with the Grimms! This is pure Peter Jackson, who has a trip back to Heavenly Creatures and reverses the sense of that "anti-moral" plot:the victim is no longer a parent guilty of violence (verbal, psychological) against the daughter, then very questionable , but the girl on duty (an extraordinary Saoirse Ronan, already a great actress in Atonement and born in 1994, just one year after Jackson's masterpiece...), raped and killed by a very credible pedophile maniac as that of Stanley Tucci. Jackson, after the binge Lord of the Rings, is able to reduce the hypertrophy of the special effects displayed there and limit it to a "The Wizard of Oz"- like dance, just updated to 2009. The killing of poor Susie Salmon is filmed offscreen, literally underground, because it is not part of humans' reality and is lit up like a noir short feature film. 

The camera angles are different from those of familiar scenes, beautifully "inhabited" by always clear and well defined profiles of the actors ("Far From Heaven" - like Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg). Beyond the fact that you "breathe" Tim Burton here, what matters is this wonderful intuition of the "three moral levels" of representation: a) underground b) family everyday life right above ground, c) the world imagined by the late Susie, flying precisely over-cinema size, as well as otherworldly. Id est: a) The dark noir; b) the family tragedy, fairy crossed by a slight sparkle of life; c) the imaginative fairy tale, "Oz" plus "Heavenly Creatures" plus Burton. 

The story ushers us through the afterlife of Susie Salmon, a small-town kid in 1970s Pennsylvania who is killed by the local pervert and looks down on her shattered family from her place in limbo. She sees mum Weisz flee the coop and daddy Wahlberg come apart at the seams. From this celestial vantage, she starts to fear for the safety of her little sister, whose jogging route leads her regularly past the killer's suburban home.

The Lovely Bones is handsomely made and strongly acted.

Nevertheless, Jackson audaciously conjures up heaven as designed by a teenage girl - a kitsch spread of sunflower fields, spinning turntables and the sort of airbrushed waterfalls. All of which is entirely fitting, and often captivating. The problem, though, is that The Lovely Bones also gives us a real world as designed by a teenage girl. The land that Susie leaves behind is so infested with cartoon archetypes and whimsical asides that, at times, it scarcely feels real at all.

Unlike the original book, gone is the dismembered body part that alerts the family to Susie's fate. Gone is her anguished mother's adulterous affair with the detective who leads the case. Gone is all mention of what really transpired in that lonely 1970s cornfield. Jackson turns up with his eyes averted, spraying cloying perfume to the left and right, but still manages to stage a wonderful dream that floats through the various levels of our conscience.

20:02:2010