Movie Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Genre(s): Mystery
Rating: R
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright
Description: Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo made for an interesting novel. It had fun characters and an engrossing plot, which made it a good read despite the author, Steig Larsson’s tendency to throw walls of information at you for pages on end. Then came a workmanlike Swedish film with a possible star-making central performance from Noomi Rapace. It told the story from the book fairly well, but beyond that it didn’t seem to have much of a style of its own. And maybe a year and a half thereafter we have a film in English (though it’s still set in Sweden) starring Rooney Mara in the title role as well as Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright, and others, directed by David Fincher. I wonder if we are now suffering from Dragon Tattoo fatigue, because a lot of people who are interested have now seen three different versions. This would be too bad, because the film is a worthy effort by Fincher, if not one of his top-tier films, and Mara in particular gives a very good performance.
Taken on its own, the latest version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is certainly worth seeing. It is essentially a locked room mystery on a grand scale. A disgraced journalist from Stockholm (Craig) is summoned to a small island off the coast of Sweden by an industrial magnate (Plummer) in order to solve the murder of the magnate’s niece forty years earlier in 1966. The mystery is deepened by the fact that circumstances were such that it had to be one of the few dozen people on the island who committee the crime (the only bridge to the mainland was blocked for several hours by a car accident), and no trace of the girl was ever found. From this comes a natural set of suspects, who we spend some time getting to know, and lots of scenes of Daniel Craig looking furtively at blurry photographs.
But what of the title character? Rooney Mara (who nobody will recognize from her role as Mark Zuckerberg’s One Who Got Away in The Social Network) plays the skinny, mohawked goth hacker Lisbeth Salander. She spends enough of the film with her clothes off that we can see that she does, indeed have a dragon tattoo on her back. Lisbeth is basically a superhero whose power is being able to do anything with an Apple computer. It is through Lisbeth that both Larsson and Fincher explore some of the themes they’re most interested in… in fact, I would argue that those who argue that Dragon Tattoo fails to transcend its pulpy roots are missing the point (and that’s surprising, because it’s not exactly subtle). While Lisbeth’s story and the way it depicts sexual violence may not feel connected to the main plot of the story at first glance, by the end of the film it all feels like it makes sense on a conceptual level. There is a reason that the original, Swedish title for the book was Men Who Hate Women, though the publisher perhaps wisely decided that wouldn’t play in the US.
However, the real reason that Fincher’s version is worth checking out over the others is the style he brings as a director. With some help from a propulsive Trent Reznor score, he creates a sense of pace that the book occasionally lacked. Hollywood is still figuring out how to deal with a modern world where technology serves as an intermediary for so many of our actions. However, Fincher never seems ill at ease with the way his investigators use many different eras of technology to uncover the clues in the mystery. The entire piece has a propulsive rhythm to it. There are moments at the climax of the story where the tension is almost unbearable, and that’s created almost entirely through the editing.
But Fincher may have made a few blunders, too, particularly in the film’s denouement, which flails a bit. It felt like people in our theater were surprised for about the final 15 minutes that the movie was still going. It’s all in the book, sure, but it’s a bit like Peter Jackson had chosen to include that bit at the end of Tolkien’s Return of the King where the Hobbits return to the Shire to find Saruman trying to set up an industrial state again. It’s kind of unnecessary and asks us to care for a long time after the movie we thought we were watching is over. While I thoroughly enjoyed Dragon Tattoo, I’d call it “lesser Fincher,” good but not something I’m going to rewatch many times the same way I have Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Social Network.
But that’s splitting hairs. If you’re a fan of the book, this film will probably make you happy. If you’re a fan of the Swedish film adaptation, I’d say this one is better, though you may also enjoy going to see Noomi Rapace in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows or Michael Nykvist as the villain in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol at the movies this weekend. If you don’t know what you’re in for, there will most likely be a few disturbing moments, but to me that just means the film is taking a chance and showing you something different. This is a cool movie from one of the top directors working today and I’d definitely recommend it.
Affiliates
