David Fincher's cinematic reboot of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which assumes you've either not seen or can readily forget Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Swedish take) semi-successfully turns a pulpy paperback into a stylish, noirish thriller.
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) finds himself out of pocket and favour when he loses a libel case against a nefarious businessman, Hans-Erik Wennerström. When a reclusive tycoon, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), summons Blomkvist to his estate in Hedestad to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet fifty years earlier, the journalist is bemused but takes the gig as he needs the money and the time out of the spotlight.
Blomkvist ends up staying in a cottage that is so cold he allows a local cat to sleep on his head, spending his days poring over mounds of Vanger's own research. He meets various members of the Vanger clan: the ingratiating Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), evasive Cecilia (Geraldine James), even more evasive Anita (Joely Richardson), and ageing Nazi Harald (Per Myrberg), and tries to start putting the puzzle together.
Meanwhile, ward of the state Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a hacker who did the background check on Blomkvist for Vanger's people, finds her kindly guardian has had a stroke; she is assigned a new one in slimy lawyer Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), who doles out her allowance only after he has forced himself on her.
When Blomkvist hits an investigative wall, Salander is suggested as a research partner of sorts, and the pair team up to sort out both Harriet's disappearance and a series of unsolved, and extremely grisly, murders of local young women, the two mysteries seemingly linked.
This Girl With A Dragon Tattoo is the sort of thriller that is compelling in an easy, mundane sort of way: all the elements are there (insane family members, Nazis, weird serial killer clues, incompetent police, minimalist Ikea home furnishings that hint at a deep well of psychopathy) for it to fall into place in a satisfying manner.
The cast is very good (particularly Mara and Craig, who give Salander and Blomkvist's interactions a subtly screwball touch, and the ever reliable Skarsgard), Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's score is creepily atmospheric, and Fincher's done all he can to elevate a reasonably standard serial-killer tale to something bleaker and more compelling, if overlong, thanks to Steven Zaillian's taut screenplay. The main problem I have with Dragon Tattoo runs a little deeper.
I'll freely admit that I've long struggled with Larsson's motivation for writing the Millennium series: if you don't know, he witnessed the gang rape of a 15-year-old (called Lisbeth) when he was a teen, and wrote the book as a sort of penance for not intervening. Okay, fair cop, Stieg, but then why perpetuate the culture of violence against women by writing three airport novels thick with rape and misogyny?
Larsson's Salander is a male writer's idea of a feminist revenge fantasy (see: tattooing "I am a rapist pig" on her tormentor); it's thanks to Mara's sensitive and complex interpretation of the character that this Salander feels as human as she does. (And the character, it must be said, is not particularly complex: that Larsson paints a survivor of sexual assault as an asocial, violent and sexually promiscuous weirdo betrays his writerly laziness.)
Yes, yes, the direct translation of the first book's title is Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor), but gee, wouldn't it be nice to have a compelling female action hero whose character motivation isn't driven by having been brutally raped, a phrase trotted out in so many synopses and spec pitches these days it ought to be trademarked, and yearning for revenge?
Fincher's film doesn't really do much to wrestle with this problem. In making the look and mood of the film darker and colder, he does give the plot the sheen of a classic thriller, rather than the source's occasionally exploitative, paperback vibe,
His crucial problem is that there's an uncertainty in his decision to look away: you may be surprised to find that his Dragon Tattoo is in fact less violent than you might have expected. However, this means that one of the film's central scenes - the rape of Lisbeth by her new guardian - is mishandled rather spectacularly. Shot like a sex scene, perhaps Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenwerth meant for the camera to mimic the salacious gaze of the various men who have abused Lisbeth. Instead, as it lingers a little too long over her writhing, exposed body, it gives the scene a subtle, but still sick-making, erotic charge.
By contrast, her revenge against Bjurman is extremely difficult to watch - rightly, in some way, since it is also a rape scene - despite being sprinkled with some moments of cathartic black humour ("Lie still. I've never done this before. And there will be blood").
In my perhaps idealistic opinion, you shouldn't want to watch a rape scene ever again; as cultural critic Natasha Vargas-Cooper put it, "If we believe that rape is a true act of violence and cruelty, then a scene depicting rape should feel ugly and leave us cringing, disgusted, perhaps even a little violated ourselves for having witnessed such a thing". And yet, I'd watch Fincher's Dragon Tattoo again, maybe on a plane, because it's a competent, entertaining thriller. What's wrong with that picture?
(Here's a little daydream: Would audiences still accept Salander as an avenging angel if there were no rape scene at all? The depressing answer, given how many "strong female characters" in Hollywood and comics turn out to also be victims of sexual violence, is, probably not.)
The mishandling of those scenes is down to Fincher's (and Zaillian's) take on Larsson's novel, but they only had so much to go with - and 'only having so much to go with' is something that colours much of the film, despite its having an impeccable cast and crew.
Could it have been different, or is Larsson's text just too bog standard a grimy thriller for anyone to be able to turn it into something more compelling? It's hard to say, though in the film's first few minutes you may find yourself thinking about what could have been.
The astounding title sequence, by Blur Studio (the geniuses responsible for Avatar's space sequences and the thrilling cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic), compresses the entire Millennium trilogy into a smash-and-grab of iconography drenched in sump oil: set to Trent Reznor and Karen O's cover of Immigrant Song, Salander's tattoos come to life, a wasp crawls out of an eyeball, Blomkvist is strangled by strips of newspaper, and a swarm of sinister USB and Firewire cords snake their way across the screen.
Unfortunately for the remaining 155 or so minutes, it's a high point that the rest of the film's potboiler narrative - no matter how stylishly Fincher serves it up - struggles to match.
- three stars
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo opens nationally on January 12th.