David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo breathes fire over the chilly Swedish countryside.
USA
4*
Director:
David Fincher
Screenwriter:
Steven Zaillian
Director of Photography:
Jeff Cronenweth
Running time: 160 minutes
At their first meeting, the septuagenarian Henrik Vanger, head of the powerful Vanger Industries, warns an investigative journalist about “thieves, misers, bullies … the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet.” These people, we learn, are his relatives, and in the cold winter air of rural Sweden, the fog that permanently hangs over the quiet desolation is the uncertainty about the intentions of a handful of people on a tiny island: the Vanger family.
The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, has come to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl, Harriet, which dates back to the summer of 1966. On that day, sumptuously recreated by director David Fincher and his cinematographer in shades of gold, Harriet seemed to be on edge, and by nightfall she had vanished like a dream.
Blomkvist seems to be the perfect man for the job: He is a keen detective and isn’t scared of naming and shaming the guilty parties, no matter how influential they are. He also happens to need some time alone, and the excursion to the remote town of Hedestad seems to be the perfect opportunity for him to regroup after a devastating legal defeat.
He soon realises that he is in over his head, however, with many corpses – all of them girls, which explains the (original) Swedish title of the book on which the film is based: Men Who Hate Women – rearing their heads from beyond the grave, and decides to bring in the goth cyber expert Lisbeth Salander to help him hack his way through the swampland of cold cases. Lisbeth is the girl with the titular tattoo, and has clearly had a very rough life, though presumably the details of her childhood will be dealt with in the sequel(s).
That is a shame, because the 2009 Swedish film, with which Fincher’s version will inevitably be compared, handles Lisbeth’s backstory very cunningly by using a momentary flashback to hint at an extremely violent streak. Furthermore, this American interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling three-part novel differs in one significant respect from the source and the other film version: While the setting, the characters’ names and all newspaper headlines are Swedish, the dialogue is in English, though Swedish interjections for “Hi” or “Thanks” do feature in speech.
Daniel Craig, who plays Blomkvist, overcomes this linguistic mishmash by playing his usual British self, and it works. Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, is an American who pronounces Swedish names with a Swedish accent. But Rooney Mara, who plays Lisbeth and has the right body gestures for the character, has a face that is too delicate for the role and her attempt at imitating a Swede speaking English fails miserably.
Fincher, who has had ample experience putting information-heavy storylines onscreen, skilfully guides us through the wealth of details from that fateful day in 1966 when Harriet disappeared. In one very effective sequence, while Blomkvist reads a timeline of the events with a yellow highlighter, we get brief glimpses of the day in the same yellow tones.
In contrast with the bright sunbathed images that constitute the past, the present is murky, perfectly anticipated by Fincher’s opening credits sequence – his best since Fight Club – in which a grey, metallic fluid seems to gush over a body that is half-animated, half-decomposing, while Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pulsates on the soundtrack.
Fincher allows himself one moment of the darkest brand of humour, pulling the kind of stunt Kubrick did when his main character in A Clockwork Orange committed a rape while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”. Here, under slightly different but similar circumstances, some of Enya’s music is used to the same bloodcurdling effect.
Such effects are the director’s forte, and he uses image and sound both subtly and grippingly to affect the viewer on a subconscious level, often hinting at more ominous details that others have overlooked to their detriment. The film’s focus on Blomkvist and Salander is sharp, but the 2009 adaptation offered an impression of danger despite the family members’ proximity to each other. Then again, Fincher does provide greater detail about the investigation’s many twists and turns, and he does so in a firm and comprehensible way that has less violence than its Swedish counterpart yet is equally effectual.