The Lovely Bones (2009)

  This is one of those rare times that I remember HBO is useful for more than Boardwalk Empire and TrueBlood.  You may remember this film from the list of Oscar nominations in February.  Stanley Tucci was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds.  Now that I've seen both films, I have to say I would have voted for Tucci but only by the smallest margin.  He was amazing in this movie.

The story is narrated by Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old girl who is murdered in a cornfield on her way home from school.  From her strange shifting world of Limbo, she is able to see the ripple effect her death has on the lives of her family and her killer.

Now, I watch a lot of True Crime shows and I spent several formative years fascinated by serial killers.

...

What?  Like you don't have hobbies?

Anyway, I appreciated the small details presented by Tucci's performance as the killer.  The stalking, the carefully innocuous facade, the meticulous planning leading up to the actual act and followed by an equally meticulous clean-up and trophy-taking.  It was a beautifully disturbing role and played with a quiet menace.  He was the cancer eating away at the Salmon family, twisting them into bloodless shells.

It's impossible to have a 'happy' ending when you know up front that the main character is dead, but the movie manages to be satisfying, at least on a karmic level.

Peter Jackson's eye for the fantastical seemed ever-so-slightly off to me on this film, which is really the only critical thing I can say about it.  His Limbo just seemed to be missing something.  I just don't think it went far enough into surreality but I can't really point to an example of where it should have gone further.  It's just one of those little niggling things that distracts from the overall effect, like an itchy tag on the inside of a really soft cashmere sweater.