In Defense of Peter Jackson's "Bones"

By Rev. Carole Hallundbaek / PRN Host, GODSPEED

When Peter Jackson spoke with CNN last week, it was to discuss the future of "The Hobbit" and to -- once again -- defend his film “The Lovely Bones,” which just went to DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday. Admittedly, it is difficult to imagine why he would need to defend anything.

A director with the Midas touch, Jackson’s epic direction of the “Lord of The Rings” trilogy earned him 17 Oscars and a legendary reputation. In

2005 he followed the LOTR with a remake of “King Kong,” another smash hit with both audiences and critics.

The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was inspired by the JRR Tolkien novels, and Jackson made them come alive with creative and technical mastery.

“King Kong,” although never a novel in its original format, was inspired by the literary stunners of its day, specifically Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot (1918).

So far so good: Jackson appears to know what he is doing with literary adaptations.

“The Lovely Bones” is a different kind of story. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare of their child being lured away by a sick acquaintance and murdered – not the kind of fantasy that invites one easily into the hills of the Shire.

From a purgatorial afterlife called the "in-between," the girl watches her family grieve, her father become obsessed with catching the killer, her mother move out, and her siblings and friends struggle with the tragedy – until there is resolution and she can proceed to heaven with the other children who were murdered by this same serial killer. This "in-between"

is a fluid and colorful plane made in the style of “What Dreams May Come.”

The common complaint about “The Lovely Bones,” a poignant, creative and jarring film based on the 2002 novel by Anne Sebold, is that it bears little resemblance to the book.

For example, sex is a central theme in the novel "Lovely Bones," detailing the tangible world of the power of sex, extramarital sex, and sex between young lovers – in addition to the heinous rape of the young girl, which viewers do not see in the film.

In Jackson's retelling, which has been called “simplified” and “sweetened,” the rape is implied and the gruesome murder is off-screen, glimpsed largely in fragmented flashbacks. Do I need to see these events explicitly?

When I was a literary associate for the Royal Court Theatre in London, I helped search for potential material the theatre could produce. Once such work we discovered was a novel called 'Requiem for a Woman’s Soul,' a difficult book inspired by a true story of a woman who was one of the ‘Disappeared’ in Central America.

She wrote her experiences of torture and rape on bits of toilet paper she could find. Eventually all that was left of her life were these tissue fragments and her engagement ring which were placed in a box and smuggled to the parish priest in her village. He put the tiny fragments of paper together to learn her story.

In the end we decided that the violence in the novel was so pornographic we could not discern how it could possibly be staged for an audience -- and abandoned the project.

As a parent, the sweetened "Lovely Bones” was disturbing enough. I understood clearly what was happening in the film without the need of extreme blunt force to my senses or my psyche.

Other films, such as Robert Redford’s award-winning adaptation of Ordinary People, also deal with the loss of a child, in that case the death of a son by drowning. The scenes of the brothers clinging to their capsized boat were perceived in glimpses and flashes as well. We see the boy slip away… we don’t follow him beneath the waters.

Were readers disappointed? Were they put off by Redford's repeated melancholic use of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” thus launching its newfound usage from Kenny G recordings to countless wedding marches through the 1980s? I don't think that soundtrack was in the book. Which raises the question:

Can a novel made into a film stay fully true to the book? And should it?

When literary texts are adapted into screenplays, there is the input of other minds, other writers, other ideas and creative energies that will add to the material. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

When the Atlantic Theater Company in New York adapted my screenplay “On the Street Where You Live” toward a stage production, I saw the actors take hold of the material and improvise all sorts of things that were surprising, delightful, and hilarious. Not part of my original vision, perhaps – but hilarious. This is the creative process.

Further, Jackson made his choices based on his sensitivity toward the material – choices that also included decency and a simple reality: we can put a book down.

Literature is not the same medium as cinematography. A book takes its time developing its environment and themes; when faced with too much to bear in the moment, a reader can put the book down to process the material. Film allows no such processing time. It is a continual motion, or in the case of a violent movie, a continual onslaught that cannot be absorbed or processed psychologically.

Jackson knows his medium. He told a difficult story in a film that can be experienced and processed, one that shows the random nature of the world, and the violent side of humanity, but one that doesn’t leave us there.

There is closure and some healing for these poor bones, sealed with the girl’s mystical opportunity to share her first kiss with the boy of her dreams before she departs this realm.

“The universe always bends toward justice,” said Albert Einstein.

Jackson made no apologies for his rendition of the film this week.

“The film is very much what we set out to make," he said. “I don't know what I'd do differently."

I stand beside him on this one.