The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

(Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/2011)

         

          The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a highly addictive soundtrack. It has Sharon O belting out Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” with Trent Reznor’s techno blabber to match it up. It has her screaming erotically towards the end. The remainder of the film features droplets of trancey techno, and one darkly humorous usage of Enya’s “Sail Away.” This music lends the scenes it is matched to a distinctive thump; that sort of conniving sense you get, when all your senses are taking in too much at once, that the images in front of you are leading to something. Is it a distressing sign that they so often lead to nothing? What of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is all thump and no sense whatsoever?

            It seems tedious to summarize the story, again. We all know about Stieg Larsson’s smash hit of a trilogy, or at least it feels like we do.  Some may be unfamiliar with the story of Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), the disgraced Swedish journalist who is hired to find a missing girl from a wealthy family, and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the antisocial youth heroin who is raped by her case worker, exacts bizarrely horrific revenge, reports on Blomkvist himself, and eventually teams up with him. For these Tattoo virgins, this film might look like a revenge-fantasy turned feminist action movie, with insistent diversions on journalism, Nazism and cyberpunk ethos. That is not a bad distillation of the book or the Swedish film, either, but the problem is that it’s a distillation, period. The book sustained itself as hugely entertaining trash mainly due to the thrill of watching it become about this disturbed mystery girl, and because of the kinky, genre-laden grab bag that constituted its structure. The whodunit, the family saga, the revenge thriller, the sadomasochistic horror story; all these genres were thrown in by Larsson; the story that emerged was a thrilling mess. Film is better at getting away with making a thrilling mess of genre than literature. Lighting can go from high contrast to low contrast, cameras from static to handheld, costumes from shiny to bloody and nobody gives a hoot so long as it flashes across the screen. Director David Fincher seems only somewhat more willing than Niels Arden Oplev (director of the Swedish film) to let his film be a mess; what both directors unwisely chose to do was smooth out the narrative sloppiness, which is, if anything, more than half of the story’s ridiculous charm. The weird family dynamics gradually explored in the novel are skimmed over; the sense that Lisbeth Salander is actually a fractured individual who gets sucked in to being a hero is replaced by the idea that Salander is a hero. With her black, close-upped to death motorcycle and helmet, her dark attractiveness (this person is meant to look un-pretty) and her perfectly timed one-liners, Salander is a movie archetype, not a genuine outcast who becomes an archetype. One gets the sense that the filmmakers and actors understood this progression, but they didn’t feel like communicating it. Motorcycles and explosions and extensive rape look better.

(Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/2011)

(Daniel Craig and Christopher Plummer in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/2011)

            The main issue, though, is that David Fincher has no patience. For a long time now, he’s been the most intimidatingly revered director in North America. He is the type of director lauded in film schools for his technical precision and perfectionism; critics and audiences love him for his ‘ability to cut to the chase’ and the way he rebels successfully in Hollywood; he gets final cut, he works with whichever actors he wants. But is Fincher a perfectionist or an opportunist? He takes the entire range of ‘film language’ so literally that to him, any story can be told with any degree of technique. That technique usually means an unmitigated kineticism that gives his films the feel of very long music videos and not cinema. This might explain his admitted talent with music (he started off directing music videos), but it doesn’t explain how he gets away with making such straight-jacketed films. For a director who apparently utilizes storyboards so well, his films are the excess of just that; Fincher has never met a shot that does not look like it was once a storyboard. The result is that his images are sleek moving panels, not moving imagery. They do not require one to see for themselves what’s unfolding. We need not be interested in delving in to the particulars of his style; Fincher strapped it to our eyes. This dishonesty, this pure arrogance does not go away in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and it doesn’t look like it will go away over the course of his filmmaking. He’ll continue to get away with it, and continue to get a free pass on his essentially cold and clinical filmmaker’s soul. He’s the most intimidating major director today, and the most depressing.

            The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a franchise movie. Whether or not it matters what the sequel will look like is now entirely in the hands of studio executives. The franchise movie might be its own very perverse genre by now; the newest Batman film will be rolling out next year, along with at least two others. They are product movies; they showcase certain music, brands, and lifestyles the average viewer may wish to follow. They are shiny; the cinematography is unblemished, un-ironic. Every character, even the bad guys, is essentially a hero in their uncomplicated way of fitting in to the film’s world, and the popular imagination. Lastly, they are cash cows; they make a lot of money. But no franchise film has yet transcended the concept of the franchise film. With Stieg Larsson’s books, it felt like we had material that was begging to be franchised in cinema, but which, more importantly, might be that transcendent film. Multiple plotlines, a broad, bombastic sense of social commentary, characters in trouble in their lives rather than in the mere mission they are assigned to; this is the stuff of an exciting franchise film. And when asked whether we should prefer the Swedish film or the American film, the answer looks irrelevant. The only realistic answer is that we should scrap it all and start over.

 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

         

        The Girl referred to in the title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth Salander is a motorcycle riding, chain-smoking, black-clad, silent-with-rage anti-hero who happens to be an expert investigative journalist and hacker. As played by Noomi Rapace, she is antidote to beautiful enigmas like Liv Ullman. Salander is an enigma of scars, a mystery of utter cynicism and inner torment. In this sense, she is not even an anti-hero, because there is no hero for her to be the antithesis of. Her image and her skills are the end product of an obsessive personality and of a disturbed past, which never really went past. She is not the icon that she would be in an American movie; she is a downtrodden figure, one of the unfortunates of society who cannot escape abuse from men. She is one of the many women in the original Swedish title, “Man Som hatar Kvinnor”; Men who Hate Women.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on the novel by the late Stieg Larsson. It is the first in a trilogy that he completed before his early death, though in fact, it is just one of the numerous books in a strong movement of Swedish mysteries. Tattoo is the most blockbuster of any of the books. It is a gloriously trashy novel that manages to sustain a socio-political theme throughout; it is a total page-turner that mixes virtually all sub-genres of the mystery novel, yet is far grimmer in its view of the world than any other page-turner.
It was impossible not to make in to a movie, and not just because of its success; first of all, the story hinges on the vitality of imagery. One of the first images we see is a picture of the smiling Harriet Vanger, a girl who dissapeared some forty years ago (the actual time of the story can be pinned around 2004). Her uncle Henrik (Sven Bertil Taube) hires Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist recently flagged with a libel suit from a competitor, to investigate her dissapearance. Blomkvist moves on to the wealthy Vanger family’s estate, interacts with the variously shady and disgruntled family members and investigates the many photographs of Harriet on the day of her dissapearence. But then he meets Lisbeth Salander. Salander has been introduced to us a wayward girl who has recently come under the custody of a new guardian. He turns out to be an evil, opportunistic man who rapes her. Salander deals with him--how does not require explanation here-- but finds her ongoing situation of abuse mirrored in the case of Harriet Vanger. However, the only reason she signs on to the case in the first place is because of her encounter with Blomkvist’s set of photographs, on the hard drive of his computer that she has been hacking for a report on his libel suit. When Blomkvist finds out who she is, courtesy of a vital clue to the case that Salander tips him off with, the two of them delve in to an investigation in which they discover further collections of imagery that become more and more brutal, revelatory and immoral.

(Noomi Rapace and Peter Andersson in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

       As a film, the book that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has to live up to is a tall order, so the most practical task of director Niels Arden Oplev is to improve on its flaws and condense its strengths. He does this task well. Gone are the silly affairs that Blomkvist has in the book, and the tiring final eighty pages is here condensed to a cool and swift ten minutes. But then, gone is the lived-in workplace experience evident in the book; the underlying setting of the story is the world of journalism, one which Larsson clearly knew well, but which must be seen from the remove of a cinema screen here. It does not particularly matter in the end; the lived-in world of journalism is replaced, quite simply, with the lived in world of modern Sweden. At precise intervals, we see striking landscape shots of the countryside, which the events of the story temper with a stormy feeling of danger. Interiors are always darker than they should be, or clinically light; the only exceptions to this rhythm are several brief scenes of Blomkvist’s domestic life, and at the very end of the film. Faces of characters are often split in darkness; they are just as frequently bloodied, bruised or somehow suspicious. Writers Nikolay Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, thankfully, did not feel the need to be slavishly devoted to the book; background information about Salander’s traumas that did not appear in the first book is shown here, and some scenes are rearranged. The film manages to sit comfortable in between pulpy genre blockbuster and Scandinavian angst film depicting an amoral society.
If the final scene feels too heroic, too schlocky in its sequel-hinting, consider this a sad form of permission for Hollywood to remake the film (David Fincher is scheduled to direct). It is doubtful that a remake would dare to utilize the genuine human pathos evident in this film. One wonders if it would still show the brutal implications of imagery. Whether it is imagery carved on the skin of a man, or photographs that both suggest a nations past and what became of a little girl, this is a film which--however sensationalistic-- believes that this brutality is worth getting on screen.