Failed Oscar Campaigns: "The Lovely Bones" (2009)

Saoirse Ronan in The Lovely Bones

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

The Movie

The Lovely Bones (2009)

Directed By: Peter Jackson

Written By: Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson (Screenplay), Alice Sebold (Novel)

Starring: Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Saoirse Ronan

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Thriller

Running Time: 135 minutes

Summary: Centers on a young girl who has been murdered and watches over her family - and her killer - from purgatory. She must weigh her desire for vengeance against her desire for her family to heal.

The Movie

There's nothing greater in a filmmaker's career than releasing a box office hit that so masterfully redefines what a blockbuster could be on every level. Director Peter Jackson was at that point in his career following the clean sweep that Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King made at the Oscars. But where do you go after making the definitive J.R.R. Tolkien masterpiece? Many predicted that he would transition to adapting "The Hobbit" - though that was temporarily in the hands of Guillermo del Toro before returning to him in a bit of a contractual obligation kind of way. He would go on to make the epic King Kong, which showed his capabilities once again on the big screen to handle a big budget remake and make it just as effective. But was this it? Was this where Jackson was going to go for the rest of his career, big movies that redefined awe at every turn?

It's partially what made his turn to The Lovely Bones all the more fascinating. Having done intimate dramas in the past, most notably Heavenly Creatures, he was capable of making films of this magnitude. Of course, it wasn't just any book. Alice Sebold's literary debut is considered one of the best selling debuts since Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." It sold movie rights before it even had a completed draft. The book was primed for a film all along, and this was in May 2000, almost two years before the book was released. There were studio disputes and Lynne Ramsay was initially scheduled to make the film - but Jackson got hold of the rights in 2004 and would dispute with studios over who would make it. The film had that much anticipation built into it. Sebold was a critical success, and the anticipation for a quality adaptation was high.

The results would come in 2009 in a bit of a different form. Jackson and partner Fran Walsh noted that they wanted to tone down the darkness of the novel's themes of rape and murder. What they wanted was to make a film that their 14-year-old daughter could watch. While this wasn't seen as the defining trait of the film yet, it would come to be the marketing's target group. Teenage girls were logically the audience, and PG-13 guaranteed that they would be able to see it. However, it was also in part because the film entered Oscar season with some of the worst traction of Jackson's post-Lord of the Rings career. The reviews weren't favorable, and it would suffer rollback release dates. Even if it did have a charismatic lead in the young Saoirse Ronan and a creepy turn by Stanley Tucci, it wouldn't be enough to keep this from being his biggest flop of the 20th century, and his only film in that time (to date) to gross over $100 internationally. The Lovely Bones is a minor blip so far in an impressive career of a studio visionary, which makes it all the more weird that it even exists.

- The Campaign -

In the beginning, the film was scheduled to open March 2009. It was a respectable date, but back in 2009 that wasn't where Oscar darlings went. It was where the studio's b-list went to have a quiet release. It makes sense then that for a major adaptation from a high-end director like Jackson, the film would be moved to the heart of Oscar season: December 11. There it could be in the eye of the conversation, where everything stood a better chance of getting the film into the awards race. With the new date in place, Jackson fine tuned the film and edited scenes to better suit his feelings of the movie. He loved that it managed to have a bleak narrative but an optimistic outlook. While he liked the book, he wanted to tone everything done so that it was more accessible to audiences, even making the visual interpretation of heaven a bit more secular, lacking any major religious symbolism. It was more of an envisioning of Ronan's internal state throughout the film.

With this in place, Jackson began the long and arduous task of also trying to raise interest in the film. He would show up to that year's Comic Con to promote the film, along with additional conversation of the upcoming The Hobbit movie. When talking about The Lovely Bones, he was keen to talk about how he was trying to make the violent imagery beautiful and make it appealing to audiences that may have been turned off by the potential poor taste that lied in a story about a 14-year-old girl who was rape and murdered. It would all be seen off screen, instead allowing the fantastical elements to signify plot beats. Tucci would still play the murderer, Mr. Harvey, with an unnerving conviction, but the film was gunning for a PG-13 - the norm for Jackson films of the time.

He also emphasized that audiences should look out for performances by Ronan and Tucci, whom he believed that the studio was highlighting for acting awards. Tucci would take it one step further and discuss how he got into the role of a killer. He believed that it was creepier that Mr. Harvey was "too normal" and that he didn't convey deep emotions. He watched videos and studied footage of serial killers, including that of the BTK murderer. What probably cinched the deal with the press was that he put this in a sympathetic text. He claimed that he was initially going to pass on the role because of how sensitive the role was. He was a father with kids, and found the idea of even watching child harming-related material to be off putting. He sold it as the most difficult role of his career while claiming total confidence in Jackson as a director. He also would claim that he was professional with Ronan, always making sure that she was fine after takes.

There was also emphasis on the special effects, which are one of the key elements of any Jackson film. In this case, it was a mix of digital and practical effects. For instance, the heaven scenes were started as matte paintings and then projected onto backdrops before being altered later to better capture the look of their desired heaven. One location's bottomless pit was also a practical effect. As a whole, the film incorporated use of both in ways that may at times look unconvincing, but others have a power to them that makes the film look unique. Jackson claimed that he wanted the heaven to look like the mental state of Ronan's character, meaning that happy scenes were bright and sad scenes were more bleak in tone. With everything in place, the film would release its first trailer in August of 2009 and prepare for whatever lied ahead as it played film festivals and received the reviews that would define its posters.

The only issue is that the reviews that followed weren't all that encouraging. While there was some positive buzz, it wasn't overwhelming in enough of a good way. This would impact its release schedule, which was an early roll-out over December before playing wide during Christmas. The bad reviews caused Jackson to do some retooling, such as adding violence to Mr. Harvey's death because of audience opinions. Despite all of this, what was discovered over time was that the film was playing very well with one audience especially. It was the teenage girl market, who proved to be the most interested in the film. As a result, the marketing would shift along with its release, which went from late December wide release to mid-January. Unfortunately, it also wasn't encouraging that around the limited release, the film wasn't performing too well. It dropped 61% in its second week, with many suggesting that it was due to poor reception and word of mouth. However, it was also the fact that Jackson wasn't the only technical wizard with a Best Picture winner of 11 Oscars to come out that month. Director James Cameron's Avatar would come out in The Lovely Bones' second week and steal almost every other film's box office attention for the next few months. The only thing that The Lovely Bones has to be thankful for was that it had time to gain traction beforehand, unlike Did You Hear About the Morgans?, which made the mistake of opening the same day as Avatar and remains as remembered as the title suggests.

The buzz around The Lovely Bones was dying before it even got to a wide release. Even in the usually favorable world of Golden Globes, the film only received an acting nomination for Tucci. This suggested that the Oscar chances were gone. There was nothing there. Still, the studio banked on the idea of teenage girls flocking to the film, much like they did the previous year's Twilight. As a result, they targeted their marketing to areas that the audience flocked, which included commercials during Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and Glee. There were ads and articles that ran on websites that they visited, and the studio was convinced that this would give them some leniency. With a budget ballooning with every marketing decision, the film ended up costing almost as much as a regular Jackson blockbuster. As a result, the film was a box office flop. While it had some early success, debuting third at the box office in wide release, it wasn't enough to restore good will for the film.

- The Payoff -

As one can predict, the film wasn't anywhere near gaining enough buzz for Oscar glory. On the day of nominations, it would receive a sole Best Supporting Actor nomination for Tucci. The film was buried underneath the giant buzz of Avatar, which was grossing upwards of $2 billion at the time and leading Oscar nominations and predictions. Even in the first official year of 10 Best Picture nominations, the film didn't stand a chance of getting into the bottom half of the list. It was a year full of genre fare like District 9, World War II dramas like Inglourious Basterds, and romantic indies like An Education. It was a diverse crowd, but Jackson wouldn't make the list. At least, not for The Lovely Bones. As a producer of District 9, he received a producing nomination for Best Picture. As of 2018, it is his last Oscar nomination officially.

This isn't to say that this was the last of Jackson's films to receive Oscar nominations. He would proceed with The Hobbit trilogy, which would mostly receive technical nominations. However, his glory days of Best Picture contender have been gone since Return of the King. The Lovely Bones was considered a rare flop for Jackson, and the second lowest grossing film he's released post-2000 after King Kong (which is over $100 million above The Lovely Bones). In 2018, the 2009 film is considered to be a bad example of Oscar bait, meaning that it was produced with all intentions to get awards. Any good intention that Jackson had put into the film didn't connect with audiences, and the film's low Rotten Tomatoes score at 32% (a career worst for the director) makes it harder to be defined as any great work of art.

It does seem unlikely that Jackson's latest project, Mortal Engines, will be in any way the failure that The Lovely Bones was. For starters, it's a return to big budgeted spectacle. It's disappointing that a filmmaker of his stature, who has proven himself capable in the past, is unable to make cinema of that intimacy nowadays and have it matter. While he still does visionary things, it's still not enough without the heart. Whatever made The Lovely Bones fail, whether it be its own bad reviews or Avatar, makes it stand out as a fascinating error on the director's part. For a book that he seemed so passionate about, it's interesting to see it missing the same success of the other book that he meticulously brought to the big screen. Still, time will tell if the film gets reappraised whether by a new Jackson film, or by the increasingly successful career of Saoirse Ronan, who has received two Oscar nominations since the film. With that said, it's an interesting failure, which at least means that everyone tried - and that's what matters more than eight years of production.