Critics rain on Jackson’s ‘Lovely Bones’ parade

Actresses Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz and teen starlet Saoirse Ronan braved a rain-drenched red carpet in London last night for the Royal Film Performance of The Lovely Bones, the latest movie from Peter Jackson. Sadly for the Lord of the Rings director, the critics also rained on his parade.

The Queen, who gets to choose the film for the annual gala performance, was not present. Prince Charles was the royal on duty, accompanied by his wife, Camilla.

The movie is based on the 2002 bestseller by Alice Sebold, about a 14-year-old girl called Susie Salmon (played by Ronan, above right) who is raped, dismembered and murdered by the local pervert (Stanley Tucci).

The story is narrated from heaven by Susie, as she watches her parents (Reisz and Mark Wahlberg) struggle to come to deal with their loss and then looks on in horror as her younger sister (Rose McIver) risks being attacked by the same man. Sarandon (above left) plays Susie's grandmother.

Sebold based the story on a real experience: while an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University, she was brutally raped after a party. Some months later, she returned to finish her degree and saw her attacker on a street near the campus. She later testified against him and he was jailed.

First reviews in London have not been kind - mainly because Jackson, possibly in search of a PG certificate, has left out the rape and refused to tackle the murder scene head on.

Xan Brooks in the Guardian writes: "Sebold's novel was not scared to look the central horror in the face... The screen version, by contrast, is so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim, that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation.

"Gone is the dismembered body part that alerts the family to Susie's fate. Gone is her anguished mother's adulterous affair with the detective who leads the case. Gone is all mention of what really transpired in that lonely 1970s cornfield."

Baz Bamigboye in the Daily Mail found the book "deeply moving" but the film "a somewhat leaden, stiff-jointed affair". He writes: "[Jackson's] idea of heaven reminded me rather of that New Seekers Coke commercial, full of pastel colours, special effects and wind blowing leaves off trees."

To be fair, the Time magazine critic Richard Corliss, who saw Jackson's film in advance of the royal premiere, wrote that, despite a few pitfalls in the plot, it was "engrossing, often enthralling".