Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/23/11
What’s
that sound? Oh, that’s just the International Bestseller Hype Machine
arriving on the scene with yet another screen adaptation of a novel obsessed
over by millions who’ve already got their knives drawn should it fail to
be anything less than exactly what they saw in their heads when they read
it. Personally, I’ve never read Stieg Larsson’s Internationally beloved
Millennium Trilogy nor seen any of the Swedish film versions produced a
few years back, so I come into David Fincher’s adaptation/remake of The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo without preconceptions or a checklist of
stuff I demand to see. You can certainly tell this is a film version
of a beloved book because it lingers over irrelevant details and goes on
way too long. It’s also a pretty good mystery, highlighted by some
great performances, but I don’t need to be a devoted reader to know that
what makes these books a phenomenon is the character of Lisbeth Salander,
embodied here in an astonishingly fearless performance by Rooney Mara.
Lisbeth is like nothing we’ve seen before, a punk genius with the thought
process of a criminal mastermind and the collective fury of every woman
who’s ever been the victim of sexual assault. She’s cleverly paired
with Daniel Craig’s endearingly frumpy journalist hero to investigate a
solid mystery full of lurid details. Lurid is Dragon’s middle
name, and Fincher’s trademark observational chilliness serves the material
well. There’s stuff here far more graphic and disturbing than the
MPAA ordinarily allows (I suspect the thought process went something like
this: It’s worse in the International Bestseller, and how could an
International Bestseller by NC-17?), and you should certainly go in knowing
that you’re going to see the Mother of All Disturbing Rape Scenes.
Of course, you’re also going to see The Mother of All Revenges on Said
Rapist, which will make it more than worth the trouble for some viewers.
Spit on your grave? Man, for Lisbeth Salander, that’s just letting
the guy off easy.
Mikael
Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) was a respected journalist and co-editor/publisher
of Millennium Magazine before he had the misfortune to run a piece about
the criminal activities of billionaire industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström
(Ulf Friberg). Sued for libel, Mikael’s story falls apart and he
loses his life savings. Worse, he and partner Erika Berger (Robin
Wright) stand to lose the magazine in a few months. He’s summoned
to the island home of Wennerstrom’s rival Heinrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer),
who has a job offer he sweetens with the promise of incriminating evidence
that could clear Mikael’s name. It seems that almost forty years
ago, Heinrik’s great-niece Harriet (Moa Garpendal) vanished without a trace,
and ever since he’s been receiving birthday gifts in the mail in the style
of the ones she used to give him. Mikael moves to the island, where
almost the entire Vanger family lives, and begins an investigation under
the pretense of working on a biography of Heinrik. But he needs
more help to sift through the mountain of old photographs, diaries and
documents that reference that fateful day, so Heinrik’s right-hand Frode
(Steven Berkoff) recommends the young woman who did a background check
on Mikael before he was hired. She’s Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara),
a ward of the state at 24 due to unmentioned violent and anti-social acts
she is said to have committed in the past. When her guardian (Yorick
van Wageningen) rapes her, he discovers in her revenge just how dangerous
the girl with a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder can be. A brilliant
hacker with a keen investigative mind, she joins forces with Mikael just
as he makes a key discovery: Harriet was conducting an investigation
of her own… and she’s far from the only woman to disappear after coming
into contact with the Vanger family.
It’s
hard to think of any role where an actress’ feels more like an ordeal than
Rooney Mara’s turn as Lisbeth Salander. The star of the Nightmare
on Elm Street remake, so good in her brief but pivotal role in The
Social Network, has been pierced to within an inch of her life, spends
a whole lot of time totally naked on-screen, does a whole lot of grueling
stunts and is at the center of that utterly graphic and repulsive rape
scene that is clearly the scene most carefully mounted to satisfy the demands
of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s devoted readership (it’s not
all that surprising to learn that Larrson titled his posthumously-published
book “Men Who Hate Women”). She’s really quite amazing, both because
of the obvious and spectacular level of commitment but also because of
the sheer craft with which she brings an utterly unique character to life.
Only in the closing scenes (we’ll get to that in a moment) does the movie
lose sight of the fact that Lisbeth is both spectacularly damaged and truly
dangerous, and in a year that’s shown an impressive willingness to allow
younger actresses to play notes of forgivable awfulness once reserved exclusively
for men, I both had great affection for and a certain amount of fear of
this woman. She has no social graces, barely any social skills, but
she knows what she wants and seems to do a pretty good job separating people
into a list of the good ones she’ll help and the bad ones she’ll torture
and smash in the face with golf clubs. I appreciated the T-shirt
she wears when first meeting Mikael, which seems to set a record for F-bombs
in a single sentence.
Which
brings us to Craig, who moves away from his James Bond tough guy persona
to deliver both moral backbone and frumpy charm as a self-confessed old
guy who gets a little winded trying to climb a hill. It won’t get
a lot of ink because of the intense chameleon act he’s standing next to,
but it’s very rare to see a leading man of his stature so willingly give
himself over to a position as “the girl” in a movie with a strong heroine.
His reactions during the second of the two sex scenes he and Mara share
are pure gold: a woman would be expected to fake an orgasm at such
a moment, but Mikael just looks a little confused while Lisbeth takes care
of business and then continues to deliver his theory of the case.
I really loved the totally unpredictable dynamic between the two characters,
where she’d clearly the dominant persona running on almost pure Id but
also recognizes Mikael as her boss, politely asking at one point “May I
kill him?” about an evildoer.
While
the setup promises more (and I get the feeling there is more in the book),
the Vanger family mostly fails to live up to Heinrik’s buildup that they’re
a bunch of despicable fiends, instead coming off as mostly just ill-tempered
until one of them patiently explains that he’s an unrepentant Nazi and
another is unmasked as a sadistic serial killer. But the performances
of Plummer, Berkoff, Joely Richardson and particularly Stellan Skarsgard
are rock-solid. Yes, it’s true that every time someone calls Craig
and his vaguely American accent “Mikael” or Wright slips for a moment into
what I’m to assume is a Swedish accent I couldn’t help but think “Oh, so
we’re Swedish now, are we?” (Skarsgard gets a pass of course, since he
actually is). But that’s an inevitable result of putting a famous
International cast to work in a story set in a very specific part of the
world.
The
parallel stories that bring Mikael and Lisbeth together and the mystery
they solve are fairly engaging and pretty tightly-written (there is a moment
when he has the “eureka” moment that solves the mystery that I feared the
movie expected me to know what he was thinking, but was actually waiting
to circle back later). There’s some really great stuff late in the
game including a “talking killer” scene as good as any I can recall.
It’s only once the primary mystery has been resolved and the movie feels
the need to revisit the Wennerström setup that seemed to only be there
to give Mikael motivation to take Heinrich’s offer that it all takes on
that bloated feel of a novel adaptation. Frankly, nothing in the
last 20 minutes would appear in a film that was an organic telling of this
story, and the way Lisbeth turns from a believably extreme heroine into
a one-woman Ocean’s Thirteen is, well, a bit disappointing. It remains
to be seen whether subsequent installments of this trilogy can redeem any
of what seems so extraneous here.
Fincher
directs with his usual precision and skill and until those closing scenes
Steven Zaillian has managed to actually make a bestseller feel like an
organic movie story, no small accomplishment. I was particularly
impressed with the gonzo James Bond-style opening credits sequence set
to a cover of Led Zepplin’s "Immigrant Song" that tells you you’re about
to see something really, really crazy. What follows may not quite
live up to that hype, or to the literary phenomenon buzz. But The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a solid thriller filled with interesting
characters I’d like to continue to follow in the seemingly inevitable sequel.
More than could be said for The Da Vinci Code. |
