Storyline
A serial killer named Harvey Walker rapes and murders multiple children but escapes justice while the murdered children play happily in limbo and watch their families destroy themselves as they attempt to deal with the tragedy of their children's untimely deaths.
Susie Salmon, a 14-year old girl in suburban 1970's Pennsylvania, is murdered by this next-door neighbour. Finding herself in a beautiful land between heaven and earth, she observes and comments on the lives of her family and friends, showing the lives of the people around her and how they have changed all while attempting to get someone to find her lost body.
Her body is never discovered and her parents suffer an unimaginable pain. The strain is far too much and her mother leaves. Her father continues to investigate and over many years maintains contact with the police officer in charge of the investigation. Susie also gets to watch Harvey and learns of his long list of victims. She also sees him prepare for his next victims – including her younger sister Lindsey.
In the end, Harvey tries to lure a young woman into his car by offering her a ride, steps too close to the edge of a cliff. As she rebuffs him, an icicle breaks and hits his shoulder. As he tries to fish it out, he falls off the cliff and breaks his neck. He dies, covered in snow.
Theoretical Basis
Film critiques that use the auteur theory focus on the authorial role of the director, it being of the belief that a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if he were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"), his voice distinctly shining through the entire production. This analysis looks at the movie, The Lovely Bones, from such a critical and theoretical standpoint.
Director Peter Jackson’s “authorial” stand, as suggested by this theory, resulted in his deviation from the original text, which is a novel by Alice Sebold bearing the same title, on which the film should have been based. It is this unfaithfulness to the source text that largely explains the many inconsistencies the movie came to have. To prove the intentional utilization of auteur theory in the film and its rather negative effects, this analysis paid much attention to those filmmaking bloopers.
Notable screenwriters such as Ernest Lehman, Nicholas Kazan, Robert Riskin and William Goldman have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial than screenwriters, but film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the creative input of producers and studio executives in classical Hollywood, argues that the auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system.” This is where the direction of this movie encountered minute problems, to its likely collapse. So menial are these flaws, these audio-video realities, that the director must have overlooked them.
The auteur theory was also challenged by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of the experience of reading literature. This, too, was the challenge to confront on the part of the director of The Lovely Bones.
Such flaws seem to abound in the film, ready to impair the movie at the hands of a preoccupied director. The role of this critique is to unearth those flaws as having been unnecessarily generated by the auteur theory that the director must have used. This is attesting to the use of something by pointing out its negative effects.
Critical analysis
A journey through the movie’s lapses and inconsistencies will bring one face to face with the following observable and verifiable flaws. It’s just a matter of paying attention to such details that one can figure them out.
When Susan met Ray and opened her locker we see the imprint "Fairfax Public Schools." Later in the movie she identified her location as Norristown Pennsylvania. When George Harvey was looking at a scrapbook there were numerous references to Fairfax Virginia printed in the newspaper articles.
As Lindsey was sneaking around in George Harvey's house, she was wearing an old style of Nike running shoes that were introduced in the 1980s. But the events in this movie were supposed to have taken place in the early to mid 1970s.
George Harvey is shown looking at newspaper articles including one about Lindsey's graduation in the Class of '77 / '78. Subsequent to this scene, Jack was assaulted by Brian in the corn field. Brian was in at least the same school year as Susie who was older than Lindsey yet the newspaper article Lindsey subsequently found when breaking into Harvey's home said Brian was a senior at the time of the assault. Also, Lindsey is shown running with a school team prior to breaking in when, according to the previous article, she would have graduated already.
Jack started developing Susie's 24 rolls of film at the rate of one per month about 6 months after her death. However, according to the article in Harvey's scrapbook, it was at least 4.5 years after Susie's death when Jack collected the final roll.
Susie says, "I was murdered on the 6th of December 1973." The 6th of December was a Thursday in 1973. When the detectives went to question George Harvey, they asked him where he was last Wednesday. His whereabouts aren't important on that day because Susie was murdered on a Thursday.
When Abigail Salmon returned home from California her hair was cut short but the next scene she is in she has long hair again. The final scene Abigail Salmon is in, her hair is cut short again.
When Abigail and Richard were in bed, we see that Abigail is reading Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus. As Richard began to kiss her, she was seen reaching toward the nightstand to place the book on top of a pile of other books, including Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. In doing so, she accidentally knocked both books to the floor, but in the next shot, as she reached over to turn the lamp off, Siddhartha has reappeared on top of the pile of books on the nightstand.
George pulled the house figure from Susie's charm bracelet right before he threw it into the water. In the next dream scene with Susie the bracelet fell in the water but still had the house figure.
Vietnamese immigration was limited to families of servicemen prior to 1975; however, there are almost no details given about Holly's character. There is evidence to contradict that she had a serviceman parent as she does not have an Anglo family name.
When Lindsey broke into Mr. Harvey's basement through the window she fell on to newspapers and they dropped to the floor only to have them disappear in the next scene.
In Susie's photo album that her father flipped through, there is a picture of a Smurf figurine at the top of the right page. While Smurf figures were around in the 70s, that particular Smurf (a singing "rocker" Smurf with a microphone) wasn't accordingly released until the late 1990s.
After Jack has been beaten up by Brian in the cornfield we see that several more buttons on his shirt have come unbuttoned but in the next scene where he is being rushed through the hospital, only the top button of his shirt is unbuttoned.
Susie was killed the 6th of December. In Pennsylvania, by December there would be little to no foliage left on the trees by then, yet when the detectives went from house to house, you see full trees and some with autumn leaves-more like a day from early October.
During the final scene as the sister is chased out of the house we can clearly see that is a fall day. The next scene (after the mother returns) we can see snow falling as the cops arrive. The scene after that shows a fall day while the safe is being dumped.
During one scene Jack is holding the ship-in-a-bottle that he and Susie made together near the beginning of a movie. In a subsequent shot he is shown busting the bottle (and many other bottles) against the desk. However, in a later shot he is shown holding the same bottle as he shrinks to the floor crying.
Grandma Lynn drives Lindsey by Mr. Harvey's house and there is snow covering the ground. Next scene Lindsey is jogging by with her teammates and gets a cramp just before breaking into Mr. Harvey's house, there isn't any snow on the ground, just leaves. Then next scene she shows the scrapbook/evidence to Grandma Lynn and when the police go to Mr. Harvey's house there is snow covering the ground again.
In the mall scene there is a "First Act" drum set in the background scenery. First Act musical instruments did not begin until 1995.
The safe in which Susie's corpse is hidden obviously weighed way too much for a single person to move, yet the killer somehow managed to move it out of his basement and into his car without anyone's help and within little time.
When George Harvey was looking at the scrapbook he had on Lindsey Salmon the first article referred to Lindsey receiving a soccer award on Saturday the 9th of May. The 9th of May occurred on a Saturday in 1970 and 1981 which is incorrect in the context of the film. Furthermore, if one closely examines each of the supposedly different articles they each contain the same exactly phrased paragraphs though in different arrangements, sometimes very incongruously (such as an article about her sister's soccer award containing exactly the same paragraph about a helicopter search for her missing sister as in a previous unrelated article).
In Susie's flashback, we see Mr Harvey dragging her cut up body into the safe with all his clothes on. His clothes were clean and contained no blood on it, yet we saw Susie watching him clean up all the blood and mud in his bathroom after her death. He is then seen getting rid of or cleaning the dirty clothes.
These and many more have been the doings of the film director in his resort to “authorial preferences,” even if it meant committing grave mistakes in the treatment of details. On his part, this has been auteur theory at work; but to the meticulous viewers, these are lapses that do not elude scrutiny.
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