By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister and science-fiction fantastical, "The Lovely Bones" was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success. In the film version, those mismatched elements come back to haunt the story, so to speak, making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph.It wasn't only the bestselling nature of Alice Sebold's novel that made "Bones" one of the most anticipated films of the year. It was the participation of director Peter Jackson and his regular screenwriting collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the team that had a considerable triumph with the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.And Jackson is successful re-creating parts of this story told by a 14-year-old girl who is savagely murdered in 1973 and then watches for years from a kind of in-between state that she calls "the blue horizon between heaven and earth" as her friends, her family and her killer go on about their lives.His best move by far was casting young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan , Oscar-nominated for her compelling role in " Atonement," as the murdered Susie Salmon. An enormously gifted performer, Ronan is the only element of the film that is exactly as it should be, bringing naturalness, honesty and radiance to the part of a young woman just on the cusp of life.Other elements, including "The Lovely Bones' " imaginative notion of what Susie's afterlife looks like, are strong, but everything that's good is undermined by an overemphasis on one part of the story that is essential but has been allowed to overflow its boundaries.That would be the film's decision to foreground its weirdest, creepiest, most shocking elements, starting with the decision to give a much more prominent role to murderer George Harvey. Expertly played by Stanley Tucci, so transformed by makeup as to be almost unrecognizable, Harvey is such an unsettling, toxic individual that the actor says he came close to turning down the role.It's not only Harvey that we see in sometimes grotesque detail, it's the bizarre decorations of the underground murder site that we watch him ever so carefully plan and build, as well as the realistic bodies of his previous victims. And there is of course the chilling time the family spends trying to solve Susie's murder.Though it's unfortunate, this focus will not be a shock to those who know Jackson's films. The director (visible in an amusing cameo examining a movie camera in a shopping mall) began his career with a fondness for splatter-type material with titles like "Bad Taste" and "Braindead." It may even be that the chance to fool around with this kind of stuff on a more high-tone level was one thing that drew the filmmaker to the novel in the first place.But though it can be argued that these things, or versions of them, are key points in the novel, seeing them on the screen plays differently, disturbing the story's balance. If Sebold's ultimately soothing novel had focused this much on its off-putting aspects, it never would have found the huge audience it did.Because the book was such a major success, "The Lovely Bones" pretty much had its choice of actors for key roles, and in selecting two strong performers, Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, as Susie's father, Jack, and mother, Abigail, both devastated in their own ways by their daughter's death, the film undeniably chose well.But though both actors have their moments, the film's erratic mixture of emotional tones, its decision to go back and forth from missing-Susie sadness to serial-killer sadism, undercuts their ability to give resonant performances.Also hamstrung, but for a different reason, is Susan Sarandon as Grandma Lynn, who's been encouraged to be too over the top for anyone's good.One element of the film that is consistently involving is the dreamscape look of the in-between world where Susie spends her time watching her murderer scheme, her sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) grow up and her parents fall apart. A field of barley that changes into a rolling ocean, huge versions of the ships-in-a-bottle that were her father's hobby, roses blooming under frozen lakes, they all speak to a world, created by New Zealand's Weta Digital and beautifully shot by cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, that is particular to Susie but special to us all.Though "The Lovely Bones" never overcomes its tendency to push things too hard, there are moments, almost invariably involving star Ronan, that resonate with the book's comforting notion of a sentient afterlife. To hear Susie speak the novel's signature lines about "the lovely bones that had grown around my absence" as she comes to terms with "the world without me in it" is to feel what we've been wanting to feel for a long time. It's also to wish that the entire film were as effective as these best moments, but that was not to be. ||||| Matt Mueller 
 
 Directed by Peter Jackson 
 
 With Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz 
 
 Opens Dec. 11 
 
 Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) is a family man and a hobbyist; he adores his wife and kids, especially Susie (Saoirse Ronan), his eldest; he also loves to build miniature ships and deftly slip them into bottles. "If you start something," he tells Susie as he's completing one model, "you don't give up till you've finished it." He glances up, seemingly referring to the ship but staring right at Susie, and adds, "That is a thing of beauty." 
 
 At that sweet moment, Jack doesn't realize he won't have much longer to stare proudly at her. Across the pleasant suburban street in Norristown, Pa., another man, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), is busy with his own hobbies. He has constructed a dollhouse, pristine and perfectly appointed but untenanted. And in a nearby cornfield, he's created an underground rec room, filled with comic books and figurines and Cokes  a kind of clubhouse where he'd like to bring the local kids. One kid. Susie. (See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.) 
 
 "I was 14 years old when I was murdered, on Dec. 6, 1973," Susie narrates in this creepy, dreamy film of Alice Sebold's best seller, directed and co-written by The Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson. The girl, who vanished late one afternoon and is presumed to have been kidnapped or killed, speaks to us from the in-between  a mostly Edenic halfway house for the recently deceased, a bridge between life and a hoped-for heaven. It's a fantasyland of penguin topiary and gigantic ice-sculpture ships, where fields turn into soggy marshes and autumn becomes winter in a flash of fallen leaves. This engrossing, nearly enthralling movie straddles multiple worlds as well: Susie's bright innocence, Mr. Harvey's meticulous depravity and Jack's ferocious determination to sleuth his daughter's fate. 
 
 Like Susie's father and her murderer, Jackson builds models  the foam-rubber puppets of his early Meet the Feebles, the exponentially more complicated imaginary realms of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong  and invites children of all ages to share his obsessions. A director wants to trap life on film, and the prime visual motif of The Lovely Bones is things in artificial enclosures: a penguin in a snow globe, a ship in a bottle, the furniture in a dollhouse, a girl underground, a dead girl in between, some lovely bones in a heavy safe. (See the top 10 movies of 2009.) 
 
 But a director's true gift is to animate these figures, bring them to life. Jackson goes further: he keeps Susie alive after she's died. He's not going for gross-out effects here. He shows Susie's attempt to escape from Mr. Harvey's bunker but not her death. And though the film follows Mr. Harvey as he disposes of Susie's remains, it concentrates on the victim and her loved ones: Jack, his wife Abigail (Rachel Weisz) and their surviving daughter Lindsey (the appealing Rose McIver, who plays Summer Landsdown on the ABC kids' series Power Rangers RPM). She could be Mr. Harvey's unmasker  or his next victim. 
 
 The New Zealand director began his career with horror movies. His well-named debut feature Bad Taste had aliens seeking human flesh for their outer-space fast-food chain, and Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive) was a Sumatran-rat-plague movie about mother love gone spectacularly wrong. The Lovely Bones has elements of some of those mulchy horror films, and another, classic one  this could be Psycho as told by the murdered Janet Leigh character. (Norman Bates had a hobby too: taxidermy.) Jackson also allows a strong echo of his 1994 Heavenly Creatures, a terrific, fact-based study of a girlhood crush that blossoms into murder, which pulled precocious performances from two teen beguilers, Melanie Lynskey and the pre-Titanic Kate Winslet. But essentially, the new film is a story of loving and mourning and loving some more. As Susie says of Mr. Harvey, "He didn't understand how much a father could love his child." (See the top 10 movie performances of 2009.) 
 
 The plot has a few pitfalls. Jack, who fingers dozens of Norristown men as Susie's potential abductor, takes ages to notice the strange guy across the street. Abigail, who departs and reappears with little organic reason, is irrelevant to the central daddy-daughter bond. Abigail's mother Lynn (Susan Sarandon) is around only as blowsy comic relief. But she does have one great line: to Abigail, who refuses to change anything in Susie's bedroom, Lynn says, "You have a tomb in the middle of your house!" In a way, that's true of all the Salmons. With Susie gone, they have a tumor in their collective heart. 
 
 The movie is packed with privileged moments. A few are grimly comic, like the interior decoration of Mr. Harvey's subterranean playroom; his choices of teen artifacts are both pathetically out of date and a window into a life of outsider lunacy. And some moments have the most poignant tang. From the in-between, Susie has a glimpse of Lindsey's first kiss  an ecstasy Susie was so close to experiencing before she entered Mr. Harvey's lair, that she hopes she can feel for real before she goes to heaven. (Read a book review of The Lovely Bones.) 
 
 Tucci plays the killer not with a madman's sneers and cackles but with a quiet malevolence; he's never more ice-shivery than when he's pretending to be normal. Such a performance could have upset the movie's balance if Wahlberg hadn't provided the solid foundation of parental devotion. The center, of course, is Ronan, the Irish teen best remembered as the girl whose lie set lives tumbling in Atonement. As the dead girl hovering over her family like a guardian angel, Ronan makes Susie seem an ordinary child whom catastrophe has made otherworldly-wise. Through Jackson's art and Ronan's magic, the obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace. Like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle. 
 
 This is an expanded version of the review that ran in the Dec. 7 issue of TIME magazine. 
 
 See the latest news about movies at Techland.com. 
 
 See pictures of crime in Middle America. 
 
 Next Invictus ||||| A dead 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), murdered on her way home from school in 1973, tells her story from heaven in The Lovely Bones. In doing so, Susie follows the narrative path set for her in the striking 2002 novel by Alice Sebold on which this much-awaited adaptation by Peter Jackson is based. But as directed by the lord of The Lord of the Rings from a screenplay by Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, his bleached Bones bears little resemblance to the book in either tone or complexity. Readers will be frustrated; newcomers to the story may wonder why what is now essentially a serial-killer thriller includes so many scenes of a heaven that looks like a gumdrop-colored hobbit shire, a magical place of fanciful special effects. 
 
 In Jackson's simplified, sweetened, and CGI-besotted telling, The Lovely Bones is a sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens. (There's no indication that Susie gets raped, as she does in the novel, and her murder occurs off screen.) Atonement's terrific Ronan, with her astonishing glacier-blue eyes, watches from a scenic afterlife as her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), younger siblings, and selected friends simultaneously heal from their loss and search for her killer. For comic relief, the family's boozy granny (Susan Sarandon) arrives, swathed in mink. Apparently participating in a burlesque movie, Sarandon camps it up, demonstrating terrible housekeeping skills and wreaking grande-dame havoc. 
 
 As for the killer, he's in plain sight from the beginning  a creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci) with the hopeless comb-over and furtive mustache of an easy-to-spot perv. Tucci is jolting in the role, honestly unsettling as he maintains an exterior of mildness that masks a grotesque interior. Electrifying danger accompanies his every scene. But this in itself becomes a problem, as that same energy leaves the screen when he does. Jackson reduces his Lovely Bones, in the end, to the dramatic contrast between the menace of a hateful killer (will he be caught?) and the grief of a loving father (can he avenge his daughter's death?). Sebold's Lovely Bones, on the other hand, is fleshed out with the perilous, irresistible power of sex  the author acknowledges a real world of extramarital sex and sex between young lovers in addition to the heinous rape from which moviegoers are shielded. The filmmaker handled the sexual power of girls beautifully in 1994's Heavenly Creatures. But here he shies from the challenge, shortchanging a story that isn't only about the lightness of souls in heaven but also about the urges of bodies on earth. Jackson forfeits depth for safe, surface loveliness. C+ 
 
 See all of this week's reviews ||||| A typical teen: Until Susie (Saoirse Ronan) is killed by her neighbor and left watching her family from the "in-between." 
 
 ABOUT THE MOVIE ABOUT THE MOVIE The Lovely Bones 
 
 * * (out of four) 
 
 Stars: Saoirse Ronan , Stanley Tucci , Mark Wahlberg , Susan Sarandon , Rachel Weisz 
 
 Director: Peter Jackson 
 
 Distributor: Paramount Pictures 
 
 Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving disturbing violent content and images, and some language 
 
 Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes 
 
 Opens Friday nationwide Some books are not meant to be adapted to the big screen. TRAILER: Get a taste of Peter Jackson's adaptation of the bestselling book Alice Sebold's best-selling The Lovely Bones falls into that category. The novel, told from the perspective of a murdered 14-year-old girl, is chilling and poetic. It can't have been easy to adapt because of its reliance on the musings of a dead, omniscient narrator. But a device that works on the page comes off artificial and emotionless on-screen. The movie strikes clashing tones, veering from lightheartedness to heavy-handedness. It's hard not to have high expectations of director Peter Jackson after TheLord of the Rings. And given his haunting Heavenly Creatures (1994), about teenagers and murder, he would seem the right filmmaker to adapt this book. But the scenes that take place in an alternate universe — a way station between heaven and Earth — are jarring. Depicting heaven has long stymied directors, and Jackson's cheesy computer-generated world breaks no ground. Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) is well-cast as the wide-eyed Susie Salmon, who has a passion for photography, loving parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) and a crush on a high school senior (Reese Ritchie). Walking home from school, Susie is lured into an underground lair by the nebbishy George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). Tucci gives a nightmare-inducing performance as the neighbor whose pleasantries are almost as scary as his violent predilections. Jackson gets the thriller scenes right. He sets up a tense sequence in which a detective (Michael Imperioli) and Harvey eye each other through the windows of a dollhouse. Susie's sister, Lindsey (Rose McIver), is suspicious and sneaks into Harvey's house to find evidence in a suspenseful episode. But the conceit of Susie trapped in a DayGlo world between the one she left and her final resting place, imparting lessons on coping with death, feels preachy. It's more moving when she utters simply: "I was here for a moment, and then I was gone." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
– Peter Jackson's crafts a fantastic vision of the afterlife in The Lovely Bones, say critics, but some feel it came at the expense of the human side of the story of a murdered teen, adapted from the book by Alice Sebold. "By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister, and science-fiction fantastical, The Lovely Bones was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success," Kenneth Turan writes in the Los Angeles Times. "Those mismatched elements come back to haunt" the film version, "making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph." "Sebold's Lovely Bones is fleshed out with the perilous, irresistible power of sex—a real world of extramarital sex and sex between young lovers in addition to the heinous rape from which moviegoers are shielded." But Jackson "shies from the challenge, shortchanging a story that isn't only about the lightness of souls in heaven but also about the urges of bodies on earth," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly. "Through Jackson's art" and the magic of star Saoirse Rogan, Richard Corliss writes at Time, "the obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace." "Some books are not meant to be adapted to the big screen," and The Lovely Bones is one of them, writes Claudia Puig at USA Today. What works in the book, she writes, comes off as "artificial and emotionless on-screen."