The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review
Arriving a little over a year after his last film, “The Social Network,” conquered every critics awards (only to be narrowly shut out at the Oscars), and adapted from a series of books that seemingly everyone on the planet has read by now, David Fincher’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” arrives with the weight of impossible expectations. It was one of my most anticipated movies of the year and that’s coming from someone who hasn’t read the books and hated the original Swedish film. (My 20 word review said simply, “This was a bad TV movie. How David Fincher will make anything interesting out of this I have no idea.”) The story follows disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) who is aided by brilliant but damaged computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) in a search for a woman who has been missing for 40 years. Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) whose great-niece Harriet he suspects may have been the victim of a serial killer and prompts the the journalist to investigate the Vanger family who he introduces as “the most detestable collection of people that you will ever meet.”
Since Fincher has already pretty much set the bar for serial killer movies with “Se7en” and “Zodiac,” let’s get the bad news out of the way up front. While the director works wonders with the material, the film just doesn’t quite live up to those benchmarks nor does it approach the pure, scorching sound and fury in that brilliant teaser trailer. (We can all agree that it’s the year’s best, right? I got goosebumps every time I saw it in the theatre.) The good news is that (‘Benjamin Button’ aside) Fincher can seemingly do no wrong and the film is a visual and aural marvel, aesthetically unsurpassed by almost anyone working today. The opening credits—featuring the Karen O./Trent Reznor collaboration on Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”—are likely to blow your hair back but then moves towards a more classical style of filmmaking. Impeccably photographed by his ‘Social Network’ DP Jeff Cronenweth, the filmmaker is done with creating the kinds of flashy shots that are now imitated by his peers and is now only interested in serving the scene. Likewise, his seamless employment of special effects is arguably the best in Hollywood because you usually don’t even realize you’re watching one (see: this “Zodiac” video).
The investigation takes place mainly on a remote island in Sweden during a frigid isolating winter and the bleak backdrop perfectly fits the icy remove between the characters. The cast is great top-to-bottom with Mara turning the iconic Salander into a complex, mesmerizing character and Craig—who hasn’t really found a good role since becoming Bond—is a perfect fit as Blomkvist. The score by Oscar-winning ‘Social Network’ duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross lacks some of the more obvious themes of their previous score but provides more atmospheric and unconventional thrills all the same. At 2 hours 40 minutes ‘Tattoo’ moves remarkably quickly, packing in details at a brisk pace and abstaining from uniting its two leads for nearly 90 minutes. So where does it fall short? Having not read the books I can’t say with certainty that the problem lies with the source material but I can certainly say it lies within the adaptations. At the core of the material, it’s simply not that great of a story and like mega-sellers (“The Da Vinci Code” or the ‘Harry Potter’ series), there are just too many fans of the book to get into any major changes without pissing off your entire fanbase.
Fans of the book should love it, because you certainly couldn’t wish for a more accomplished visual stylist than Fincher to bring the book to life, but newcomers to the material may wonder what all the fuss is about. Yes, Salander is an interesting character and setting full of potential intrigue but in the end it’s just too straightforward. (There are really only a couple of suspects and if you look at the most suspicious one, you’ll probably be right.) There are detours and pieces of information that don’t drive the story forward and even bits from the book that may seem crucial in the book (like the infamous brutal rape scene) but come off as a bit gratuitous in the film. Would we have felt any differently about her character without some of these moments? Possibly but probably not. And it’s certainly not a conventional thriller in that there are very few scenes involving any sort of chase or suspense, even the violence is limited to a few brief blasts. As an auteur who does not double as his own screenwriter, Fincher is at the mercy of the scripts and that puts him at a handicap. Though he recognized the challenge of turning a “supermarket potboiler” into a great film, I’m not sure he got all the way there.
