REVIEW: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Thursday, December 29 2011 - Reviews - by: jared_cm

 

 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an incredibly complicated movie, so it seems a perfect fit to have a complicated guy, David Fincher, direct it. I’ve made the fact that I’m a big fan of his work very clear, and this piece can rest very soundly with the rest of his body of work. Only someone with his meticulous kind of nature and sense of style could pull off turning an incredibly dense and profoundly disturbing source material into something strangely beautiful, albeit still profoundly disturbing. It doesn’t hurt that he got two wonderful lead actors in Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara who were invested enough in making this work that they were willing to do whatever it took to get the initial vision across. I should say up front that I haven’t read the book nor have I seen the 2009 Swedish adaptation. I don’t feel like it’s a prerequisite, because if a film is successful it should stand on its own anyway (while, of course, not completely disregarding the source material), which Dragon Tattoo does.

 

I’m not sure how much input or hands-on influence Fincher had in the opening title sequence (these sequences are usually outsourced to a completely separate production house), but it does feel a bit like it’s harking back to his music video days, as we’re treated to gorgeous, yet beautiful psychadelic imagery underneath Karen O’s chaotic (but awesome) cover of ‘Immigrant Song.’ It only gives us a taste of what’s to come. Interestingly, after that powerhouse intro, the film gets off to a bit of a slow start. Perhaps that’s the wrong choice of words, and it isn’t to say that it isn’t interesting, it’s more just an overload of information. The first third or so of the movie you’re just inundated with names and places (all Swedish of course) and shady business practices, all while trying to follow the seemingly completely separate plotlines of Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). It’s almost enough to make you wonder how you’re going to keep everything straight, or even if you’ll be able to make it through the whole film.

 

Fortunately, one of the wonderful things about this film is how well it pares down the information that you actually need. You’re first presented with this complete information dump, but as the film moves along, the unnecessary parts are methodically stripped away so you’re only left with what you need to know. It’s as if we as the viewers are sifting through the clues and eliminating dead ends along the way just as the characters are, which is just all the more engrossing. The film follows Mikael, who is a journalist who has recently been publicly shamed for attempting to bring down a major corporation with faulty information. He is soon after hired by a wealthy aristocrat Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate a 40 year old murder that has been haunting him and his dysfunctional (to put it lightly) family. The film also follows Lisbeth, who is a brilliant investigator/computer hacker and blurs the lines a bit on the legal avenues to finding information. To call her rough around the edges would be the understatement of the century, but she gets the job done and that’s what matters. It’s interesting, because with all the hype for Ms. Mara’s portrayal of Lisbeth leading up to the release (even Fincher saying that it could potentially ruin Mara’s career because she would always be looked at as Lisbeth) I found myself thinking that she didn’t seem nearly as iconic as people were making her out to be. However, the fact that I’m a week removed from the film and I still can’t get her out of my head proves otherwise. Her intensity is unmatched by anything I’ve seen in some time, and yet she has little flourishes that show the many layers of the character.

 

While Mikael is getting started with his investigation into this mysterious killer, we learn more about both how Lisbeth gets her information and how she lives her life. This includes her dealings with a pig of a social worker who dangles the carrot of money in front of her in exchange for fulfilling his sick fantasies. It’s a rough part of the film to get through, but it’s handled...tastefully. A horrible choice of words when referring to rape, I know. But it’s done in a way to make you uncomfortable (as it should), but not in a gratuitous way that will just repulse you and take you out of the film. As disconcerting as it is, Lisbeth still finds a way to work the situation to her advantage and certainly gives him his comeuppance. Soon after, she is actually brought in to work with Mikael on his investigation, which is where we get to the real meat of the film. The middle hour or so of the film, when it really kicks in to murder mystery mode, is like something out of a Fincher’s Greatest Hits collection. It takes some of the best elements from films like Zodiac and Se7en and puts them together masterfully.

 

With such an intriguing build-up and an excellent and exhilarating middle, it’s kind of a shame that the end falls a little flat. Once the mystery is solved, there’s still some other loose ends to be tied up in the business side of things, which, after all that’s just happened, is so uninteresting. It feels like this is more a problem with the source material than the actual film, but it’s still kind of a shame in the pacing. The good far outweigh the bad, however, and the ‘bad’ really isn’t bad per se, just kind of excessive. With such a knockout performance by Mara, it’s easy for Daniel Craig to get overlooked. Also because he really just kind of plays Daniel Craig, but it works so perfectly for the role, and his on screen chemistry with Mara is perfect. Those performances, combined with the master storytelling and beautiful direction of Fincher make this easily among the best of the year, albeit perhaps not for the squeamish.

 

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