The Lovely Bones is Peter Jackson’s other film, the one he directed between his passion project of King Kong and his return to Middle-Earth with The Hobbit trilogy. Based on the bestseller by Alice Sebold, this supernatural drama is both deeply emotional and deeply flawed, a film that tries to balance beauty and evil and manages to cancel both out.

I enjoyed Saoirse Ronan in City of Ember and her ingenuous skill carries over to The Lovely Bones, in which she portrays Susie Salmon, a perfectly happy 14-year-old girl in 1973 who falls victim to an uncomfortably leery neighbor George Harvey, played with unsettling guile by Stanley Tucci. She hopes to be a wildlife photographer; she has a mutual crush on a fellow student from England; and she has her whole life ahead of her. Or rather, had, since she succumbs to the very stranger danger that kids are always warned about nowadays. The rest of the film follows her family as they deal with their loss, particularly her heartbroken parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz), even as Susie explores her personal heaven and watches those she left behind through a fantastical lens.

The film as a whole reminded me of The Five People You Meet in Heaven (they both feature Michael Imperioli) mixed with the serial killer story from the 1983 miniseries Chiefs, yet falling short of either. Everything about Harvey is disturbing (though thankfully not graphic), from his methodical planning of the crime to his efficient hiding of it, similar to Keith Carradine’s role as a murderer in Chiefs, and it’s no wonder Tucci received a Best Supporting Actor nomination. As the story continues, the audience’s desire for justice grows as well, or revenge in Susie’s case. The anticipation grows as both another murder and his comeuppance approach, and when the climax arrives, the height of tension strangely coincides with the height of romance, a reincarnate second chance which ultimately supplants the more concrete drama. At the moment when we think the killer will be caught in the act, Susie lets him go, for rather selfish reasons, in my opinion, since he clearly plans to continue his death spree. By the time he gets some form of just desserts, it feels random and tacked on, despite some foreshadowing, with little apparent closure for those he wronged. By the end, everyone just gets over it, and there’s even the suggestion that things are better for Susie’s loss. Certainly, growth from tragedy is healthy and necessary, but it’s a stretch to consider everyone the better for it.

In addition, the scenes of Susie traversing the ethereal “in-between” are certainly lovely, with a vibrancy of color and fluidity of landscape that suggests an eternal dream, yet they ultimately serve little purpose except to indulge in giant special effects. There’s surely an artistic, symbolic reason for crumbling gazebos and shattered ships in bottles, essentially to offer a more visually impactful perspective to what is happening on earth, but the deep-seated grief from the talented cast carries more than enough poignancy, making the effects redundant and excessive.

While the film’s heaven is basically devoid of God, the kind of happy, watered-down, self-made afterlife Hollywood prefers, it is not without beauty. The best example of the attempted duality of repugnance and hope involves Harvey’s other victims, listed and shown in chilling succession yet revisited in “heaven” as a morbid but happy sisterhood. This is the film’s high point, and it sadly goes downhill from there. While it tries earnestly to lighten the mood with existential hope and Susan Sarandon’s comic relief, the film cannot escape the fact that it is a sad story, well-told but unsatisfying.

Best line: (Susie) “There was one thing my murderer didn’t understand; he didn’t understand how much a father could love his child.”

© 2015 S. G. Liput

294 Followers and Counting

(Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was for a poem written in a specific quatrain called a Sapphic, which I employed above. Tricky.)

Ironically, The China Syndrome is a film neither about China nor a disease, but rather an anti-nuclear thriller which acted as a forerunner to 1983’s Silkwood, sharing some of its themes. In fact, its early production grew from Jane Fonda’s desire to make a film about Karen Silkwood, though she eventually joined forces with Michael Douglas to create a fictional plotline informed by fact. Fonda and Douglas both star in the film as well, the former as a conflicted reporter tired of fluff news and the latter as her opinionated cameraman, who films an unexpected “accident” at the Ventana power plant in California. While both are eager to report the furtively obtained film, the bosses at both the news station and Ventana refuse to allow its release, even as Jack Godell (an exceptional Jack Lemmon) uncovers threats to the plant’s safety no one will take seriously.

Since it was recommended to me by my VC (who loves the young Michael Douglas in a beard), I knew from the start that The China Syndrome would have an anti-nuclear message, with which I was prepared to find fault since I personally do not object to nuclear energy and believe it to be safer than many critics imagine. As Douglas’s Richard Adams (not the author of Watership Down) vehemently decries the “cover-up” of the news station heads, I couldn’t help agreeing with his bosses. Just as we the viewers don’t fully understand all the technical jargon, Richard and Kimberly didn’t either. What they filmed was in no way definitive, lacking both sound and context, and to report it would have been professionally irresponsible, throwing volatile news out there just because it happened. Since the incident was also being investigated by the proper authorities, Richard’s eagerness to point an accusatory finger at Ventana seemed overly biased. However, as Godell’s complaints build up and roadblocks grow in the way of their next plant, Ventana’s subsequent actions become truly deserving of reproach. In scenes reminiscent of the end of Silkwood, the cronies attempt to silence dissent, pushing Godell to a breaking point as he hopes to bring them down with him.

As an anti-nuclear commercial, The China Syndrome failed to convince me, probably due to my conflicting bias, but I was pleased that it didn’t preach. As a film, it’s riveting, particularly toward the end, and every actor makes the most of each meaty role, evoking nuances and moral dilemmas that are not easily overcome. I’m no fan of Jane Fonda, but her skills are well-utilized to portray both Kimberly’s perky on-camera persona and her intuitive desire to be a hard-hitting journalist. She, as well as the set decoration and original screenplay, garnered Oscar nominations, but the most deserving was the Best Actor nomination for Jack Lemmon. His tragic performance becomes progressively more powerful, as he hesitates to challenge his superiors and eventually threatens everyone in order for the truth to be told.

In the end, despite its cast of anti-nuclear advocates, The China Syndrome (named after the theorized worst-case scenario of a nuclear core meltdown) becomes for me a condemnation not of nuclear power in general, but of the bureaucratic cutting of corners. The plant had an initial problem, which should have been swiftly corrected, but, despite all the fears of the plant being unsafe, its own built-in systems worked as they should have. The true issue lay in greedy executives trying to save money at the cost of human safety, an issue that applies outside the nuclear industry as well.

In one of the eeriest instances of life imitating art, the similar Three Mile Island nuclear incident occurred days after The China Syndrome’s release, which served to bolster the film’s revenue by making it even timelier. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, whether it be for movies or precarious forms of energy, and even if I disagree somewhat with its underlying message, I found this nuclear film to be anything but a bomb.

Best line: (Jack, during the investigation) “What makes you think they’re looking for a scapegoat?”  (his friend Ted Spindler, played by Wilford Brimley) “Tradition.”

© 2015 S. G. Liput

291 Followers and Counting