The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson’s film of Alice Sebold’s bestseller “The Lovely Bones,’’ then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film. The miscalculation on almost every level is perversely thorough. It’s as if the filmmaker, faced with an endless series of daunting creative choices, proudly took the wrong road each and every time.

Maybe you have to be delusional, though, to try to create a tasteful movie out of a book narrated from limbo by a girl raped and murdered in the opening scenes. Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, the young betrayer of “Atonement’’ and by far the best thing here) perches above her small 1970s Pennsylvania town in a sketchy but surreal afterlife, watching over the years as her devastated family and friends cope with her disappearance. The novel’s tone is wistful, elegiac, detached, in direct contrast to the agonizing events and emotions Susie describes, and without that long-view naivete - Susie’s voice, literally - the story might be impossible to endure.

Jackson’s first mistake is that he thinks we want to know what heaven looks like. Since “The Lord of the Rings’’ and “King Kong’’ have established the filmmaker as a reigning god of CGI, he visualizes Susie’s afterlife as a series of vast, endlessly morphing digitized landscapes - mountains swooping up, moons swirling down, tangerine trees, marmalade skies. It looks like all 12 pages of a very expensive New Age calendar, and it is kitsch; it’s also wholly beside the point. Susie’s heaven is unfinished because Susie’s life is; even Ronan seems to understand that.