Stan Tucci's lovely roles

By GRANT SMITHIES - Sunday Star Times

LANDING A lead role in Peter Jackson's latest movie, The Lovely Bones, was a blessing and a curse for acclaimed actor Stanley Tucci. A blessing, because he loved the script and was excited about working with Jackson.

 

A curse, because the character Tucci was being invited to play was pure evil. A rapist, a paedophile, a serial killer.

"It was the hardest role I've ever had to play, without question," says Tucci from his home in New York. "It was such a challenge, I didn't want to do it at first. It made me very nervous to play someone like that, and I really don't like stories where children are hurt.

"And, as I expected, it was scary to play, but once you decide to do it, you have to do it well. You have to get in there and dig deep, and put things in your mind that you'd rather were not there. In the end, I decided to do it because it was so intriguing, and the script was beautiful, and it was about far more than just a guy trying to kill a girl. It was emotionally complex and poetic."

Poetry comes no blacker. The Lovely Bones begins with Tucci's character, George Harvey, raping and murdering 14-year-old Susie Salmon in a small-town cornfield in 1973. He cuts her up and takes her home in a sack. Oh, except for her elbow. That bit falls out, and a dog runs off with it.

But what makes this movie so special – and what helped the original book become a runaway bestseller – is an unexpected supernatural twist; the spirit of the dead girl watches subsequent events unfold from her own personal heaven, a place she calls "the In-Between". She watches her family deal with their grief. She sees her friends grow up without her.

And, as the years pass, she watches her murderer kill again several times, and get away with it. When George Harvey eventually meets his end, you can't be sure whether it's due to natural causes or a bit of heavenly intervention from his former victim.

"Yes, it's not your traditional tidy Hollywood ending, is it?" laughs Tucci. "The ambiguity of the ending, and the sloppiness of this murderer's life, they're so believable and so human. It just wouldn't be right if the police came to arrest this guy just in the nick of time."

Shot in New Zealand and Pennsylvania to a script written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, The Lovely Bones is slated for release next month. Alongside Tucci, rising starlet Saoirse Ronan plays Susie Salmon, Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg play her parents, and Susan Sarandon her grandmother. The Sopranos' Michael Imperioli plays the police detective investigating her murder. Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno composed the score.

The finished movie is on pre-release lockdown, with no advance press screenings, even to those interviewing principal actors. If I saw it, they'd have to kill me, and so on. But an extended trailer is viewable online, and two things are immediately striking about it. Firstly, Ronan is a star in the making. With watery blue eyes and a peculiar on-screen intensity that reminded Jackson of the young Cate Blanchett, the 15-year-old Irish actress seems perfectly cast, radiating innocence and melancholy.

Secondly, the Afterlife sequences look extraordinary. Jackson has found some cunning ways to visually represent a central premise of the book: that the dead not only haunt the living, but the living also haunt the dead. When the dead child's grief-stricken father smashes a tiny ship in a bottle on Earth, a huge version of the boat is wrecked on the rocks in the Afterlife. When Susie's little brother draws a picture of a sunrise, her restless spirit watches it peek over the mountains in her world.

The trailer has set off a storm of speculation on movie websites and blogs. Will this movie be too dark, too light, too "Hollywood", too cheesy? Why was originally cast father, Ryan Gosling, ditched at the last minute and replaced by Wahlberg in his "bad 70s wig"? Are the Afterlife sequences too reminiscent of fantasy scenes from Terry Gilliam's movies, or 1998 Vincent Ward flick What Dreams May Come, in which a dead Robin Williams wanders around in a world based on his grieving wife's paintings? Can a movie with a God-free version of heaven be expected to "bring home some hardware" come Oscar season?

And, as for the "certifiably creepy" Tucci, what a transformation! There he is, so furtive, so damaged, so quietly malevolent in his glasses and bad comb-over, looking – as one blogger put it – "like he dressed up as Chester the Molester for Halloween".

Is this really the same camp creature who played Meryl Streep's much-abused art director Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada?

Can this be the same actor playing opposite Streep right now in Julie & Julia, almost stealing the show as Julia Child's adoring husband, Paul?

"Yes, I am pretty hard to recognise, aren't I?" he laughs. "I can only say, that's a good thing. The fact that I don't look like myself in The Lovely Bones helped me get rid of that character at the end of each day's shooting. As for Julie & Julia, it was great to play a lighter role like that before starting this movie, and it was wonderful to work with Meryl again after The Devil Wears Prada. She's so much fun. I just adore her! She's such a great, well-respected actress that people imagine she'll be really serious and unapproachable, but really, she's hilarious."

Like Streep, Tucci is regarded as an "actor's actor", capable of bringing dramatic subtlety and depth to everything from mainstream TV to comedy to Broadway to dark art-house roles. Now 49, he has won awards for recurring TV roles on ER, Monk and Murder One, and shone brightly in films such as Prizzi's Honor, Road To Perdition, Big Night and Swing Vote. The guy even lent some much-needed class to the otherwise dire Maid In Manhattan. Tucci is also a writer and director, and runs a production company with actor Steve Buscemi.

He is a man known for his meticulous approach to research. With Julie & Julia, Tucci read numerous books about Paul Child and interviewed surviving family members. But with The Lovely Bones, he couldn't bring himself to read the book because he felt it might be "too grim", and worked only from Jackson's script.

Fair enough. Published in 2002, the book upon which the movie is based was written by Alice Sebold, an American novelist whose writing is invested with more personal pain than most. In 1981, while aged 18 and attending Syracuse University in upstate New York, Sebold was beaten and repeatedly raped in a tunnel where another young woman had previously been murdered and dismembered. She later recognised her assailant in the street and notified police, and the man was imprisoned.

Sebold's first book, 1999's Lucky was a harrowing non-fiction account of her rape, and The Lovely Bones followed in 2002. Her most recent novel, 2007's The Almost Moon, is about a woman who murders her mother. All three books are concerned with extreme violence in small-town settings, a theme Peter Jackson has previously addressed in 1994's Heavenly Creatures, a film many still consider to be his best.

In the weeks leading up to the release of The Lovely Bones, one question is probably uppermost in the minds of those who have followed Jackson's career from gory home-made splatter flicks to big-budget epics: will he get the tone right? Will Jackson's movie version of The Lovely Bones plunge down deep into some of the book's darker places, or will he succumb to the more sentimental tendencies that have marred some of his other movies?

"I've seen the finished movie, and it's incredibly moving and disturbing, as it should be," says Tucci. "I think Peter got the tone just right. Dead on, in fact. I love it. Everyone who's read the book has their own interpretation, and this is Peter's version of that imaginary world. But this is the perfect story for Peter in so many ways, and you can see why he was so excited to direct it.

"There are so many levels to it. Peter got to deal with the emotionality of the story and the complexity of all the relationships, and then also all the extraordinary visual stuff that was crucial to putting us into the Afterlife. There's great scope for visual beauty with the heaven scenes, and as we all know, one of Peter's real strengths as a director is his profound and singular visual sense. There's also a murder mystery down on Earth, and at the heart of it all, there's a meditation on the process of grief."

Tucci understands grief; his wife Kate died of cancer in May. Early last year, he brought her to New Zealand during the shoot, with their three children, Isabel, Nicolo and Camilla.

"Me and my family were in New Zealand for five weeks and had a great time down there. We got to go to the South Island. Is that what you call it? The South Island, right? We drove down through the wine country, we went to Queenstown, we went on a helicopter into the glaciers. All of it was incredible. And then, after the shoot was finished, it was great to be able to finally shrug off this evil character and move on to the next thing. Was he really that stressful to play? Oh, my God, yes! If you had a steady diet of roles like this guy, believe me, you'd kill yourself."

The Lovely Bones opens in cinemas on December 26.