If you were to saunter into the offices of any major movie studio and request $80 million to engage the cream of international talent so that they might make a lavish two-and-a-half-hour-plus movie about sexual violence against women, featuring all manner of graphic content and centring on a protagonist who is a) bisexual and b) possibly insane, you would most probably find yourself rapidly expelled from the same offices very shortly afterwards, possibly not even via the door. Unless, of course, said movie had a built-in audience, due to it being an adaptation of a massively popular novel by one of the most bankable names in modern literature. Some say he was a journalist who investigated and campaigned against the extreme right. Others say that he spent time in his youth training African women to use grenade launchers. All we know is, he’s called the Stieg (Larsson).
Yes, it’s David Fincher’s value-for-money adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – one of those books which everyone seemed to be reading just a couple of years ago. I, whether fortunately or not, am one of the eight people in western Europe not to have done so, nor have I seen the Swedish movie version of this story. So at least this review will be unpolluted by outside influences, for a change.
Set in Hollywood Sweden (i.e. everyone speaks English – this produces some very strange and intrusive effects, such as when the print on a cheque is in Swedish but the script in English), Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading investigative journalist who’s facing a career crisis after a lawsuit goes against him. He is thrown a lifeline when elderly tycoon Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) retains his services, ostensibly to write his biography but really to investigate the vanishing of his niece decades earlier. The Vanger clan are a prickly and deeply dysfunctional group, with more than one former Nazi sympathiser amongst them, but – rather to his surprise – Blomkvist makes progress. Wanting to corroborate his findings, he retains the services of a superbly efficient investigator the Vangers have previously used to run a background check on him.
She is Lisbeth Salander (Mara Rooney), a striking and uncompromising figure: androgynous, fiercely self-contained, heavily tattooed and pierced (she is the title character). The events of a traumatic childhood have left her emotionally aloof, and also the ward of the state. Nevertheless she leaps at the chance to assisting in hunting down a serial killer who preys on women, not realising the danger that she and Blomkvist may be placing themselves in.
First things first – judged by any reasonable standard, this is an excellent thriller. The distinctly Bond-esque title sequence with accompanying rock song may create entirely the wrong set of associations for the audience, but it soon becomes clear that this is a more thoughtful and measured kind of film. Indeed, there’s almost something of Agatha Christie in the set-up of the central mystery plot. Said plot is satisfyingly convoluted and clever, and the movie never insulted my intelligence – if anything, it insulted my stupidity in that a few small points whizzed past a little too swiftly for me to keep track of them! This did not spoil the overall experience, though.
Beyond this, though, the film has a peculiarly sprawling structure. It’s quite a long way into what’s a long movie before Craig and Rooney team up (the chemistry between them is excellent and both give terrific performances), and prior to this it’s a little unclear what the significance of the Salander character is.
This is particularly the case given that the thread about Blomkvist and the Vangers is, initially at least, rather genteel. The scenes with Salander, on the other hand, frequently plunge into graphic unpleasantness with virtually no warning. This is why this movie has been slapped with a box-office-unfriendly 18 rating in the UK, and deservedly so. They are not pleasant to watch: there is considerable sexual violence and other explicit abuse. I could feel the atmosphere in the auditorium change the first time one began, and shift again whenever one seemed to be in the offing.
Then again, if people find scenes of rape and abuse shocking, that’s surely only for the best? A friend who saw the film said he could have done without them – but interestingly, he didn’t come out and say they were gratuitous. They absolutely aren’t – to me they’re central to the theme of this film, which is the effects of sexual violence on both the perpetrators and the victims. Given the devaluation of violent crime in so many movies and TV shows (victims blown away by the score in CSI, hunting killers treated as a jolly, jokey game in Midsummer Murders), the extreme nature of some sequences in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo serves to make clear exactly the character of the offences the film is dealing with. I found parts of this film difficult to watch, it’s true – but that’s as it should be, in a civilised society. I thought this was a brave and commendable choice on the part of the film-makers.
David Fincher’s direction is fluent, Steven Zaillian’s screenplay is deft (and even shot through with dark humour in places), and all the performances are accomplished: Rooney and Craig particularly so, while a rather good Stellan Skarsgard pops up to fly the thesping flag for the home team. (Nearly everyone else is British or American – accents are rather variable.)
What really surprised me was how much of a European sensibility this film managed to retain – in its careful pace, its refusal to provide the obvious set-pieces one would expect in a Hollywood thriller, and most of all in its closing stages. With what’s been presented as its central plotline apparently resolved, the film nevertheless proceeds for quite a long time, dealing with various other subplots. Salander, who has grown in significance throughout the story, is suddenly unequivocally the main character and the film is now about her on a more personal level. It’s a little jarring, especially when the story then suddenly concludes, without presenting any easy answers and in a dismayingly downbeat fashion given what’s preceded it.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine another conclusion to a very solidly-made film with a distinct flavour and toughness of its own. Lots of little bits of it resemble other things to some degree or other – but taken as a whole, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a unique experience, and a high quality movie. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s only that fact that stops me from giving it a very strong and unreserved recommendation.
No Chic. Just Geek. 