Norristown, Pennsylvania. It was 1973 when Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old girl, was brutally murdered and her body hidden by Mr. Harvey, her neighbor. Susie ends up in limbo and, while waiting for a passage to heaven, she observes what happens on Earth, particularly with her family. Her father is desperately searching for the killer, her mother leaves home devastated by grief, and her sister seems to have become the next target of Mr. Harvey.
After watching "Amabili resti" ("The Lovely Bones"), one is led to reflect on how rare—if not entirely impossible—it is to find an effective representation of the afterlife in cinematic works. Depicting Hell is simpler—and indeed, there are more successful examples—whether one aims for the dark anxiety of Dante, normalization, or a wholly fantastical dimension, but rendering Paradise in images seems destined to remain unfinished. Abandoned are the naive locations filled with white clouds and golden gates that once prefigured the collective paradisiacal imagination (now destined solely for coffee ads), in recent years, there has been a tendency to give the ascending afterlife a nearly New Age representation, filled with pastel colors, auroral lights, and Zen symbolism. Not escaping the trend inaugurated and sublimated by Vincent Ward's dantesque "What Dreams May Come" is Peter Jackson's latest work, this "Amabili resti" which presents itself as a film with a confused identity and guilty structural shortcomings.
To be honest, "Amabili resti" does not show us Paradise but simply a limbo, a portion of heaven—which the protagonist of the story calls an antechamber to the true Paradise—where Susie Salmon, the murdered girl, is directed. But the difference is not substantial, and the ultimately tiresome scenes showing Susie walking along beaches where bottled sailboats run aground, running through immense wheat fields, skating on frozen lakes beneath which flowers bloom, or dreaming of being a model, are a point against Peter Jackson's thriller-fantasy. From a purely visual standpoint, there is nothing to say; it abuses clichéd symbolism, okay, but the power of some scenes is undeniable, and the juxtaposition of a harsh story with the delicate and velvety fantasies of a young victim has its charm. However, one gets the impression that what should have been the particularity of this film, the element that should distinguish it from so many other thrillers, ultimately turns out to be the great intruder in a film that would undoubtedly have been better without it. This means having failed, and for Peter Jackson, as far as I am concerned, it would be the first time in a career made of decidedly enviable films.
"Amabili resti"—adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel of the same name—begins as a well-crafted thriller, describing the ordinary life of a fourteen-year-old girl and her family in the early 1970s. School, first crushes, the fluctuating but still positive relationship with her family, a classic overview of the adolescent world narrated in a sober and engaging way, further supported by a first-rate cast composed of Mark Wahlberg ("Max Payne"), Rachel Weisz ("The Mummy"), Susan Sarandon ("Thelma & Louise"), and especially the young Saoirse Ronan ("Atonement"). Then enters the story the shadow, the evil represented by the serial killer played by a magnificent Stanley Tucci ("The Terminal"; "Big Night"), the ordinary man with an anonymous and benign appearance who hides a perverse and sadistic soul, a pedophile and murderer. So far, we are presented with excellent premises, further reinforced by a meticulously crafted direction that makes us appreciate Peter Jackson here even more than when he is dealing with battles, digital creatures, and action scenes.
Unfortunately, the film then becomes messy, curling in on itself with the introduction of the fantasy element that was not successfully integrated with the story. The scenes involving Susie in the afterlife seem to belong to another film, especially it is not clear what influence the girl has on the world of the living; she would seem to be a simple observer—which would be the optimal choice—but Jackson insists on ruining the "magic" by clumsily and utterly out-of-place inserting the girl's interventions in the real world (someone sees her, someone hears her...) that reach their peak in the poor final climax that seems to want to echo in a completely gratuitous way Jerry Zucker's "Ghost". Some narrative turns, moreover, appear too rushed if not characterized by oversimplifications translatable into "plot holes," and I refer especially to the way the Salmons begin to suspect their neighbor. The inclusion of some poorly characterized characters (the psychic girl), banal (the boyfriend), or even ridiculous (Holly, the girl similar to Virgil who keeps Susie company in limbo) complete the picture of a film that presents too many flaws to be passed. And it is a shame because there are also so many other positive elements, such as those listed above, which unfortunately tend to take a backseat in a film that, in the end, is neither fish nor fowl.
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