'Lovely Bones' Cuts Too Close to the Bone

As inevitably happens with successful books, the elegiac story has been rendered into a movie with a talented and appealing cast. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are the parents of three sweet, wholesome children in the mid-1970s in a small town outside of Philadelphia. Susan Sarandon plays (how is this possible?) the grandmother; Saorise Ronan, the little girl at the center of last year's hit movie "Atonement," is Susie; and Stanley Tucci is the "banal and horrific" child rapist and murderer.

Because my husband is a member of the screenwriters guild, we were lucky to receive a DVD screener from Paramount, and this past weekend, as 20 inches of snow was about to fall, we built a fire and tried to watch. I'm sure the actors all turned in fantastic performances, but I can only comment on the first half-hour because I had to turn it off.

Susie begins the story by telling us she was murdered by a man who had been watching her, planning to kill her, for some time, but that she had not noticed him until too late. We see the face of evil through a pleasantly bespectacled and bewigged Tucci as Mr. Harvey, a dollhouse maker at a shopping mall toy store. He later lures the child into a hidey-hole he has built as a miniature playhouse filled with tiny marvels to tempt a girl on the cusp of maturity. Teapots and figurines fill shelves and decorate the incongruous hole he has somehow created in the middle of a corn field, and Susie descends to her destiny believing the friendly adult ("How are your parents? Say hello for me.") has generously created a gift for neighborhood children -- a place, he promises, no grown-ups are allowed.

That's as far as I got, because by then the skin about crawled right off of my own lovely bones. The script was written and directed by Peter Jackson. In Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, his anthropomorphic Gollum was one of the creepiest cinematic villains of all time, but Jackson outdoes himself against the background of 1973 American suburbia.

My husband, who paces plots for a living, immediately saw where the narration was taking us and left the room to do dishes. I held out until Tucci came into full focus before I turned it off. From the moment the predator and his prey were in the same scene, it was like watching a soft-core snuff film. I'm sure that wasn't Mr. Jackson's intention, and I'm also sure he's a fine director, but his scary movie was too upsetting for me. For what it's worth, the performances were exquisite for the few peeks I could stand to endure.

Luckily, we had Pixar's "UP" to watch instead.