I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years ago and didn’t care for it, between the awkward prose, stilted characters, and violent revenge fantasy that fueled the story, so I gave up on the trilogy rather than plowing through the two subsequent, longer books that followed. The film adaptation
If you haven’t read the book, the basic plot is that Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist in temporary disgrace who is hired by an aging industrialist to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of the industrialist’s niece Harriet. The industrialist used a research firm to investigate Blomkvist first, and the reclusive, tortured hacker Lisbeth Salander, who did the actual research, ends up teaming up with Blomkvist to try to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and find the previously undetected serial killer whose identity Harriet seems to have deduced right before she vanished.
Salander’s character is all hard edges, from her eidetic memory to her flawless cracking skills to her extremely insular personality to her refusal to talk about the traumas of her past. Her portrayal ends up critical to the film, not just because she is the Girl of the title but because Blomkvist’s character is about as dull as an old butter knife. Rapace, a Swedish actress whose English-language debut will come in the next installment of the Sherlock Holmes reboot (which, as a fan of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, I have to say looks like a circus freakshow’s take on the character), inhabits the character with a brooding intensity and a barely concealed rage that keeps threatening to explode through the surface. But even when she is violently raped – more on that scene in a moment – by her legal guardian (long backstory there), she channels that rage into a violent, controlled revenge that gives her what she wants by reversing the balance of power. Conveying all of this through Larsson’s clipped, unrealistic dialogue is not simple; it puts more responsibility on the actress involved to convey it through body language, tone, and facial expressions, and Rapace does so from start to finish. It was no small shock to see her out of character in one of the DVD extras and discover she’s kind of cute. There is no cute to her portrayal of Lisbeth.
That rape scene, though … I’ll confess that my wife and I both voted to fast-forward through it. We’d both read the book and knew exactly what was coming, but the thought of watching that attack on Lisbeth in real time was repulsive, and the film does not shy away from just how violent the attack was, or just how much of a violation it was. That scene in the book is all about power and powerlessness, and there’s no question that those aspects come through in the film version. Even at double the normal speed, it went on too long to stomach, and watching Lisbeth get her revenge doesn’t erase it for the viewer any more than it would erase it for her character.
The last half of the movie is all about Blomkvist and Harriet looking for clues in old newspapers and business records for the identities of the serial killer’s victims and, eventually, his identity as well. There’s tension as they visit the sites where various bodies were recovered, but no real drama until Blomkvist blunders into the killer’s grasp and has to be rescued by Lisbeth in a scene of fake-tension – you know Blomkvist isn’t going to die with two more films in the series, but the book and film both push him to the brink of death before it happens. In other words, don’t watch this just for the plot, which is mildly interesting but also extremely sick (reflected in the book’s original Swedish title, which translates to Men Who Hate Women). Watch it for Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth, and for the tremendous prep work that had to go into creating all of the documentary evidence that she and Blomkvist eventually use to find the killer.
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I commented on Twitter that I was unlikely to go see the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, due out in theaters this winter, because these remakes tend to fall short of their originals. This isn’t strictly a language issue for me, but a cultural one. For one thing, large American studios that remake foreign films tend to Hollywoodize the films to increase their commercial appeal, often changing plot elements, dumbing down smarter dialogue, softening harsher elements that might scare away viewers or hike the film’s MPAA rating, or employing more marketable actors who might bring their own audiences. They have every right to try to make more money, of course, but these are not factors that typically increase the quality of a film. For another thing, there is a pretty clear insinuation in these remakes that the studios believe that Americans will not – or can not – tolerate a film with subtitles. I’m not exactly Mr. Art Film Snob, but I’ve seen at least 20 films with subtitles in at least eight foreign languages and have never once felt that my opinion of a movie suffered because it was subtitled. You get used to them in a matter of seconds, and then you don’t notice them for the rest of the film. Did Inglourious Basterds fare worse at the box office for its heavy use of subtitles? No. So why do we need an English-only version of a film that was made very well by native actors in their own country?
Several readers argued that the director of the English version, David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), makes it worth watching on its own. I understand that the director of a film can have significant influence on its ultimate quality, but in this case, I’m not concerned about the directing but of the script itself, and as far as I can tell, Fincher wasn’t involved in the screenplay, which was adapted from the book (not the Swedish film) by Steven Zaillian, whose filmography since Schindler’s List skews towards big-budget and commercial efforts, including Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, and, of interest to most of us, Moneyball. I’d also consider it a negative that the filmmakers were reportedly offering too little money for the role of Lisbeth, not because I think money buys you a better actress but because it sends a signal that the studio and/or Fincher don’t see Lisbeth’s role as the crucial one. I might eventually see the English version, but the early indicators on the film’s quality are not all that favorable in my eyes.