Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I certainly had high expectations for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo going in. Granted, we’ve all been burned by unsuccessful movie-to-book adaptations before, usually because the filmmakers got lazy and didn’t quite change enough to allow the film to stand on its own, but I had a feeling this would be different. Not just because I love the source material – I devoured the books – but because of the director’s history. David Fincher has a great track record, not just with making tense thrillers about serial killers (Seven springs to mind here, of course), but also because his adaptation of Fight Club proved that he can lend plenty of his own personality to someone else’s material. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo does so as well.
But who is this girl, you might ask if you haven’t read the book? Well, first off, you should – while the film makes it perfectly easy for someone who isn’t already familiar with the material to follow, it really is a great read. Secondly, she is a master hacker and a ward of the state whose sullen, antisocial nature and tendency towards violent outbursts leads her to be declared mentally incompetent. Of course, she’s anything but, and her skills as a hacker lead her to Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist investigating the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl named Harriett Vagner, which leads him to a series of uncomfortable secrets about her family. And I do mean uncomfortable – graphic sex (including rape), violence, gore, strong language, and Nazism all factor into this movie, so you might want to think twice about bringing the kids along.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gets a lot of mileage out of a fantastic lead performance. Rooney Mara does not so much play Lisbeth Salander, the titular girl, as she does embody her. She does a perfect job of looking like the pale, scrawny Lisbeth, and she does an even better job of embodying her fierceness, aggressiveness, ticking time-bomb intensity, sullenness, and the heart she has buried underneath all of that. For as much as I love Salander, I’ve always had slight reservations about Mikael. Not that I ever exactly disliked him, but there was always something a little too idealized about him, and knowing that both himself and his late creator Stieg Larsson were journalists makes me feel that the character – an intelligent, powerful, respected ladies’ man – was a big love letter from the author to himself. However, Daniel Craig alleviates this problem. While he is just as charismatic as one would expect, he also seems more natural than his print predecessor, bemused by the turbulent events around him long after the nail-biting climax.
Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Photo by Baldur Bragason – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Pacing is another thing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has going for it. It’s a long one, clocking in at two hours and forty minutes, but you won’t notice that until you look at your watch as you leave the theater. The film moves by at a steady clip, cutting between scenes rapidly. This creates a tense, confused mood that is heightened by the musical score. Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor is responsible for the music here, and once again, he adapts himself quite well – his bizarre, eerie, often discordant soundtrack, similar to that of The Social Network, increases the brooding, tense atmosphere. The cinematography is similarly excellent – crucial scenes such as the explosion at a bridge that led to Harriet’s disappearance are portrayed exactly as I imagined them. The script also works pretty well – not as memorable as The Social Network’s, but this sort of movie isn’t really about script to begin with.
Director Fincher was working with some solid material here, and while a lesser filmmaker might have turned this into a standard, action-packed (at the expense of all else) mess of explosions, gunfights, and car chases, this is a gripping, high-energy, well-paced work. It’s hard to find significant flaws here, and while there’s nothing that’ll make you rethink the way movies are made (so don’t look for the mind-bending twists of Seven and Fight Club), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is stylish, tense, dark, and very well acted. It certainly lives up to the reputation of the book, and I hope that Fincher returns to direct the inevitable sequels as well.
Chris Schahfer
