Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was murdered 36 years ago today.
On Dec. 6, 1973, she was killed in a shed constructed underneath a cornfield. The man responsible for her death was George Harvey, a neighbor. She was the oldest daughter of Jack and Abigail Salmon. Big sister to Lindsey and Buckley. Granddaughter of hard-tippling, stylish Lynn.
Bright, wide-eyed, she was on the verge of a first kiss to a soft-eyed kid at school named Ray Singh. They were in film club together.
These are some of the details Susie shares from her perch between heaven and Earth early in “The Lovely Bones,” opening Christmas Day.
Based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel and directed by Peter Jackson of “The Lord of the Rings” fame, the film is among a trio of high-profile projects that provocatively take on child endangerment this season, either at the hands of a stranger or, in the case of “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” and “The Blind Side,” at the hands of family members.
Child abuse is a familiar theme in film. But these latest works, brutal at times, contemporary and willfully told with a child’s perspective in mind, nudge us toward fresh consideration of how we consume such stories.
Are they throwaway entertainments or a way toward a richer empathy? Should they be fodder for weekly television series? Or is film a way to grasp the reality some kids live, a way of imagining how survival, reckoning and even renewal might happen?
When “The Lovely Bones” trailer began playing with regularity in theaters last August, the story of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard was making headlines. It was a consciousness-rattling convergence of reality and cinema.
The 29-year-old woman had been abducted at a bus stop near her home when she was 11. Her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, a paroled sex offender, kept her in a derelict set of shacks in back of his and his wife’s home. He fathered her two children, ages 11 and 15.
Granted, viewers can find echoes of reality on the small screen in every other episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Stories exploited to drive “ripped from the headlines” television often exert a different emotional power when written for and projected in a darkened theater. Movies work on us differently.
“Precious,” “The Lovely Bones” and “The Blind Side” wrestle with the repercussions of neglect or all- out warfare waged against children from the more intimate perspective. Some us come to these works as shaken observers of suffering and hope. Others are more personally touched.
Just ask Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the abused 16-year-old survivor in “Precious.”
“The first time we presented the film at Sundance (Film Festival), a woman came over to me,” she recalls.
“She had two little girls and she said, ‘Thank you for doing this film. I brought my daughters and this is their life.’ I kind of kept it together. They were pretty little girls with blond hair, blue or green eyes. You’d just never think.”
Sidibe remembers she smiled and thanked the woman. “Then I got in the car and I broke down. People want to share their experience after seeing the film.”
A child’s perspective
Over the past several years, there have been a number of movies (primarily indies) that have not shied away from child abuse. But they have typically been told from an adult perspective. “Little Children,” “The Woodsman,” “Gone Baby Gone” come to mind. They are compelling films that wrestle with the issues.
What distinguishes the latest cluster of films isn’t just their high profile. (And each is likely to garner award-season attention.) They also engage their children protagonists’ points of view.
Often, children function as stand- ins in films. They represent our lost innocence, our sense of vulnerability, our desire for second chances. They are not really children. They are not bodies.
Last year’s big-screen adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” which pits a zealous nun against a popular priest who may or may not have molested a boy at a parochial school, doesn’t deal much with children except through the prism of adults. The stage production doesn’t have a child in its cast.
“Doubt” is a parable about suspicion and anxiety. It’s an indictment not simply of individuals but of institutions, their power and culpability.
In Clint Eastwood’s 2003 tour de force, “Mystic River,” Tim Robbins’ character was abducted and molested as a child. Yet the movie’s chief focus is on the destructive nature of revenge. After all, Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn) targets the wrong guy for his beloved daughter’s murder.
Indie filmmaker Greg Araki’s achingly lovely and unsettling “Mysterious Skin” (2005), based on Scott Heim’s novel, is kin to the current films. At its start, street hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) tells us that he and his Little League coach “fell in love at first sight.”
Needless to say, he’s an unreliable narrator. And the film does a touching job of depicting the psychological confusion sexual abuse can cause.
“Scott’s novel was the first time in my life I felt like I understood what it might be like,” said Araki. “You really feel what these boys feel, and you go through the aftermath of this trauma with them.”
Although “Precious” doesn’t have a voice-over, the novel on which it’s based came at readers in graphic, painful first-person — the force of which director Lee Daniels did not lose.
In “The Blind Side,” based on the true story of gridiron star Michael Oher and the well-to-do Memphis family that made a home for him, steel magnolia Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) constantly strives to understand Michael’s life from his perspective.
The most fantastical of the three, “The Lovely Bones,” is narrated by a dead child reckoning with the violence that sent her to the afterlife.
“As adults we find ourselves speaking so much for children,” says donnie l. betts, director of the recently closed “Slut Energy Theory,” a one- woman play in which the character recounts years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
A filmmaker also, betts is at work on a documentary called “We Wear the Mask: Who Speaks for the Children?” about civil rights leader James Bevel, convicted of molesting his daughter in 2008. He died later that year.
“What I found in my research is that there were a lot of adults talking. I wanted to have those children speak as well. One individual can’t speak for all the children.”
A closer eye
In “M,” Fritz Lang’s enduring 1931 feature about child endangerment, a German city of 4 million is turned upside down by a series of child murders.
The film opens eloquently as a mother sets the table for a daughter. Moments before a woman scolded children playing and singing a song about “the nasty man in black.”
Now the clock ticks. Other children trudge up the apartment staircase. The dishes set for supper remain untouched.
Little Elsie Beckmann never arrives.
Peter Lorre stars as the predator who eerily whistles the “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as he begins his hunt. Then he is hunted, not only by the authorities but also the city’s criminal class, who see him as the worst of the worst.
Yet it is the citizenry that shares the burden of the missing and murdered. “The majority of them doesn’t realize a child disasappearance is also their problem,” says one frustrated detective.
Right before “M” ends and the screen goes black, a woman sits on a bench outside a courtroom. “We, too, should keep a closer eye on our children,” she says mournfully.
This fall three films are encouraging audiences to do just that. Watch and perhaps understand.
“Art can make people relive images,” says betts, “but also give people hope.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
