What I Think About Movies I've Seen

This is a movie about closure. The trailer tells us that Susie Salmon (played by Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old girl, is murdered, and it's pretty clear that her neighbor (played by Stanley Tucci) is the one who killed her. For the duration of the film, the characters are trying to come to grips with that. Susie herself is stuck in a kind of purgatory because she's not yet ready to leave the world behind. Her father (Mark Wahlberg) is devastated, but then becomes fixated on figuring out who killed her. Her mother (Rachel Weisz) can't deal with her father's obsession and leaves. Her brother and sister, as well as the object of her first real crush, are also left struggling to deal with the loss.

This is a good movie that was almost ruined by a bad ending. The story, acting, music, and visual effects were all very good for nearly the whole movie, but I didn't feel that the ending was on par with the rest of the film. I won't spoil any of the details, and I don't know how faithful it was to the book, but the more that I think about what happened, the more I feel cheated. I do think that the quality of the first two hours is able to outshine the disappointment of the last fifteen minutes, but for a movie in which closure is such an important theme, it's unfortunate to walk away with the feeling of something missing.