Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Here’s a question for you, why do so many really good movies come from some of the most mediocre source material? ‘Do they?’, you may ask. In my opinion, Jaws, Jurassic […]

12 years ago

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Here’s a question for you, why do so many really good movies come from some of the most mediocre source material? ‘Do they?’, you may ask. In my opinion, Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, The Green Mile, and Bladerunner all respond in unison, ‘Yes’. Each of these movies is amazing, but let’s be honest here, none are based on any works of literature that we’d beat down the door of the Swedish Academy to proclaim as ‘impressive’ or ‘innovative’. Sorry Bladerunner. This is not to say that only bad books make good movies, but I’d liken it to the way that lyrics on the page may leave you cold, but the same lyrics recited twenty feet away on stage could leave you gasping through tears.

So this brings us to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You can’t deny the hold the book has on the reading public’s imagination, but its quality? Well, I’ll say that it is an adequate thriller made slightly more interesting by being set in Sweden.

Before I say anything else, I should probably say that David Fincher is one of my favourite directors, and I say this as a guy who doesn’t usually put much stock in directors. I was excited to see this film. I can’t think of a much better marriage of subject matter and director. I mean, serial killings, technology, alienation, torture, shadowy stuff, it’s like Fincher went back in time and wrote the book he always wanted to film. Combine that with the ominous, industrial tones of Trent Reznor’s soundtrack, and you have a perfect storm, right?

Not quite. It’s here that I already found a niggling problem. While Reznor’s earlier collaboration on The Social Network added unexpectedly dark and unsettling undercurrents to a film about smart guys making a website, this time he adds dark and unsettling undercurrents to dark and unsettling overcurrents. There are a few really good tracks, but it’s just so… predictable!

To my dismay, I came to see that this slight flaw was part of a much larger problem. There are individual scenes and performances from this film that are easily the best I’ve seen this year. Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander is not to be missed. She mixes cunning and viciousness with a brokenness that lends depth and pathos to a role that would seem unnatural and superhuman in a novel. She is joined by a cast of veteran actors so skilled that cellphone footage of them all eating cold cuts at the caterer’s table would win a Palm D’Or. The only slight misstep is Daniel Craig. While his acting is excellent, I can’t help but feel he’s still a little too ‘James Bond’ to play a sad-sack journalist, the beta to Lisbeth’s alpha.

There are two sequences in the film (I won’t spoil them) that are masterpieces of tension, suspense, and fear. Reading these scenes in a book, you’re free to imagine as much of them as you choose, either simply skimming the words or dwelling on them and painting the picture yourself. Fincher takes these scenes and chokes you with them, there is no looking away; you are forced to cringe or revel in his version of events. The effect is powerful and lasting. This is what Fincher does best. Unfortunately, these are only pieces, maybe half-an-hour of a 160 minute movie. The rest is well executed, but its pace lets the film down. You can’t dog-ear the film stock and come back later, you have to trot along as the film struggles to become a meditation on violence (like his previous (excellent) serial-killer flick, Zodiac), but ends up being a slow burn full of cold Swedish location shots, patient archival research, and a glacial accumulation of tension that breaks thirty minutes before the credits. Instead of transcending its source, Dragon Tattoo just ends up doing it a great deal of justice.

However, I’m still giving it four-out-of-five, because Fincher on an off-day still directs circles around all those other hacks.

Written by Mark Kersteen, standing-room-only writer

Photos: © dragontattoo.net
© dragontattoo.com

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