First look: Murderous ‘Lovely Bones’ is also ‘curiously optimistic’

Posted on April 20, 2009 • Filed under: "The Lovely Bones", Gallery Updates — No Comments

For all the violence and grief of The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson believes the movie adaptation need not be a downer.

In fact, he says, the film version of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel about teenager Susie Salmon, who watches from heaven as her family collapses after her murder, is downright uplifting.

“I found the book to be curiously optimistic,” Jackson says by e-mail from New Zealand, where he’s finishing the film. “I felt inspired by Susie’s struggle to come to terms with her own death. In the face of overwhelming grief, she finds hope.

“She holds on to love, and by doing so, she transcends the horror of her murder.”

Don’t expect Lord of the Rings-style special effects to create a nether world, Jackson says. The film, which stars Saoirse Ronan as Susie and Stanley Tucci as her killer, proved one of Jackson’s toughest, particularly scenes of the child’s afterlife.

“It’s God-less in the sense that when Susie dies, she finds herself caught in a place between Earth and heaven — she is in an ‘In-Between,’ as Alice Sebold calls it.” When she moves on, “we’re happy for audiences to imagine this new world in whatever way makes them comfortable.”
Source: USA Today