The Lovely Bones is a 2009 supernatural thriller drama film directed by Peter Jackson, starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, and Saoirse Ronan. It is based on Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel of the same name, which follows a young girl who is murdered and watches her family from “the in-between” as they try and move on from their loss while also trying to find answers. In 1973, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old girl, is walking home from school through a corn field one night when she is stopped by a neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). He coaxes her into a hideout he made underground, telling her it is meant to be a clubhouse for the children in their neighborhood. He proceeds to kill Susie, and from that point on the main character moves throughout the film as a ghost watching her family and friends. Another dead girl, Holly (Nikki SooHoo), attempts to get Susie to leave “the in-between,” where she watches her family from, and go to Heaven, but Susie is unwilling to leave her family between until they can find clues from her murder. During this time Susie’s father, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), and younger sister, Lindsey (Rose McIvver), begin to suspect Mr. Harvey of the murder and set out to prove his guilt. In this blog, I will talk about the changes made between the two adaptations like the timeline of events, character development, and how Susie’s death and afterlife are portrayed.
In the film, the passage of time is much quicker taking only about five years for everything to get resolved, when compared with the book which takes nearly a decade. In the film there is a sense of urgency to the actions of several of the characters, which helps to progress the plot at a quicker pace; something that is helpful to the medium given its own time constraints. For Susie’s father, Jack, this urgency is felt from his need for answers about his daughter’s death and to find her killer. In both versions of the story, Jack nudges his younger daughter, who is now about the same age as her sister was when she died, into suspecting Mr. Harvey. This leads to Lindsey breaking into the killer’s home in order to get proof for her father. For the movie, this is the climax of the story as Lindsey is able to find enough proof to convince the police that Mr. Harvey is the one responsible for Susie’s death. In the book this is not the case. as it is really only about halfway through the story and Lindsey, though finding some evidence, is dismissed by the police as not having enough proof. Jack then spends years trying to prove that George Harvey killed his daughter, and by the time the police believe him and have proof, Mr. Harvey has disappeared. At first, book Jack is a lot like movie Jack, trying to find answers as quickly as possible, but realizing he has to take a step back or else people won’t believe his theory about Mr. Harvey. This allows for a greater period of time to pass, while his obsession takes over his life for years longer, as he is unable to move on from Susie’s murder and fracturing his relationships with the family he still has left.
Whereas Susie’s mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz), is more interested in moving on and when she leaves her family in the movie it feels a lot more unexpected rather than rushed, when compared to the character in the books, as Jack has a lot less time spiraling which is one of the reasons why she leaves. Book Abigail also ends up having an affair with one of the detectives investigating her daughter’s case, so the time before she leaves is already filled with her distancing herself from her family. By the time she leaves, the reader can tell she will not be returning for a long time, and Abigail doesn’t as by the time she returns, Linsdey is an adult and engaged while her youngest child, Buckley, is now a teenager. In the movie, her leaving feels temporary and it has only been a couple of years, as she returns the night that teenage Linsday breaks into Mr. Harvey’s home. As a result of the timing in the movie, there is less of a sense just how broken the characters are from Susie’s murder, causing the relationships for each character to shift much less and certain ones to not be formed at all.
For most of the characters, their character development is mostly the same even if it is a bit rushed; for the character of George Harvey though this is not the case, as the film cancels out most of his character arc to a few brief cuts and voice overs by Susie. Mr. Harvey’s character is much more menacing in the book, as the reader gets more insight into his childhood and how he eventually became a serial killer. There is an understanding that readers have about him, which allows for that fear of him to grow as we see just how monstrous a human can be. This human aspect to the character isn’t as prevalent in the movie, so even as viewers can see that he is a dangerous man, there isn’t that same aspect of fear. The one time the movie does justice to how scary of an individual he is, comes right after Susie’s death. Mr. Harvey is taking a bath, and the water is quite dirty from the cornfield’s mud and Susie’s blood. He also has a washcloth over his face which adds to the suspense. Susie as a ghost is in the bathroom watching this, but to her it is a white void with Mr. Harvey in the bath. As she looks around, the camera cutting to different angles in the bathroom showing her growing confusion and fear, Susie comes to realize that he has killed her. This scene holds the viewer in a way that rings true to the descriptions of Harvey in the books, more than any other scene. If anything, the film makes Harvey a slightly less scary character, taking out the explicit details of what he did to Susie and those other girls and women he murdered. Sometimes in film, subtlety and implying things, instead of straight showing works, but I think in this film the truth and reality of his raping and murdering Susie is much more chilling than how it just implies what he did. But I do understand the filmmakers’ choice in portraying George Harvey and his actions in the way they did, as if it had been more explicit, the film would definitely have been rated R and not PG-13.
When I first watched this film, I was a teenager and about the same age as the character of Susie, and eventually Linsday, so many of the more nuanced details didn’t quite make sense to me. A big part of that I think has to do with how Susie is portrayed when she is dead and in her version of Heaven. In the film she can’t go to Heaven until she lets go and is in “the in-between”; this isn’t the case for the books which has her go to a part of Heaven right away, but because she is still watching over the living, she can’t explore all of it. The film’s version of Susie’s afterlife is very metaphorical and to do this the filmmakers relied a lot on greenscreen to make it seem magical, but because of this her character arc seemed a bit stunted and confusing. In the book, her part of Heaven is represented by a high school and where she lives there are other kids her age that are dead, including a roommate Holly, who is also in the movie, but as more of a guide for Susie to Heaven. This interaction with other dead people, mostly kids but also a few adults, helps readers to see Susie as a character outside her family and death, something the film doesn’t accomplish as well. It allows Susie to not always be adhered only to her family’s problems, something I think keeps movie Susie still feeling like 14 years-old by the end of the film. Whereas in the book, Susie has mentally grown to that of an adult even if her spiritual form still looks like an adolescent, like missing the career as a photography she never got to have and having a sex with a boy. The movie briefly touches on these points, but they are modified for the mentality of a freshman in high school, for instance, instead of having sex, she wants to kiss a boy for the first time. Because of these changes to the story, the film felt like it focused more on Susie’s death and not her afterlife, which I think is an important distinction as it affects how audiences will take in the actual story.
I think overall that the film tells a really interesting and heartbreaking story that is easy for viewers to become engrossed in. It was a film, that in the past, I have had a hard time getting a grasp on from the way it is constructed narratively; but reading the book helped this greatly, as it allowed the motivations of the two most important characters, Susie and George Harvey, to become more understandable. This increased my satisfaction of the movie’s slightly different ending much more, as Mr. Harvey is never arrested for his crimes and rather dies on accident before he can pay for the lives he has taken. In both mediums he dies the same way, by losing his balance and falling from a great height, but the book allows the reader to understand how sometimes life unfolds in ways that still allows an ending and for the characters to move on, even if it isn’t the ending everyone hoped for. In both versions there is a sense of relief because Harvey’s death means now one else will die because of him, and Susie finally gets to be happy in her afterlife.
—Jo Spangler, Film blogger
Jo’s Bio:
Jo Spangler is a junior at Lewis University, majoring in English Literature and Language with a minor in Creative Writing. She is a writing tutor in the Lewis Writing Center and a Youth Enrichment Aide for the YMCA. In her free time, Jo enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, and watching movies. She has been to 10 countries outside the United States, including England, Italy, Turkey, and Austria. One of Jo’s favorite book series is The All Souls Trilogy, by Deborah Harkness, because of how she mixes the supernatural with history and the focus on character development. In the future, she hopes to go into the publishing industry to help find new and exciting books for people to read.