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Alice Sebold’s juggernaut bestseller The Lovely Bones is getting a big-screen adaptation courtesy of Peter Jackson, who directed the even more massive Lord of the Rings trilogy. The film—about the spirit (ghost? soul?) of a young girl who watches her family try to solve the mystery of her murder—doesn’t come out until December, but the trailer has just been released. It looks fantastical, creepy, and awesome. Based on the trailers alone, I’m much more excited for this than I am for the year’s other big softly-sci-fi screen adaptation, The Time Traveler’s Wife. (Plus I can’t get enough of that Saoirse Ronan, who played the little linchpin in Atonement.)
I missed the original Lovely Bones craze—as I somehow manage to do with every big book universally declared to be awesome—but seeing the trailer makes me want to just wait for the movie, so I can be totally surprised. Good idea? Bad idea? What did you all think of the novel—and does this trailer meet your expectations?
Still from The Lovely Bones trailer courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures.
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I haven't read the book either, Nina, but I feel as if I've already seen the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones. It was called Murder in Greenwich, told the story of Martha Moxley's violent death in Belle Haven, and aired on USA in 2002, the same year Sebold's book came out. Both stories involve the deaths of pretty teenage girls (Moxley was 15; Sebold's character, 14) and take place in the mid-'70s (Moxley was killed in 1975, Sebold's character in 1973).
The true-crime version has a more interesting cast of characters; Mark Fuhrman wrote Murder in Greenwich, and Ethel Kennedy's nephew (a distant relation of mine) was eventually convicted of the murder. But both screenplays, weirdly enough, involve the victims themselves sweetly narrating the search for the killer from heaven. Is surveying the application of justice from another world just something we expect adolescent girls to do?
Still from Murder in Greenwich trailer courtesy of Columbia TriStar Entertainment.
