Ducking into a movie theater on a tropical winter afternoon in Lihu‘e to see a film featuring the frigid winter landscapes of Sweden can be its own escape. That the movie was “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” likely proved
Ducking into a movie theater on a tropical winter afternoon in Lihu‘e to see a film featuring the frigid winter landscapes of Sweden can be its own escape. That the movie was “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” likely proved the bigger draw for local fans of the international blockbuster book of the same name who filled the theater.
Many fans got a sneak peek of sorts. A Swedish-made movie of the book, with English subtitles, came out in 2009. The new, American-made version is the more stylish, bigger budget version of the two, directed by David Fincher of “The Social Network” and “Fight Club” fame.
That bigger budget probably helped Fincher land the solid supporting cast boasted by the movie and also the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, in the lead male role of Mikael Blomkvist. Craig plays an investigative journalist who is hired by a wealthy industrialist to look into a 40-year-old murder mystery.
But this is a movie about a girl with a dragon tattoo. And it’s the lesser known actresses who each played the lead role of the brooding, sometimes fragile and sometimes efficiently brutal Lisbeth Salandar who commanded the screen in the Swedish and U.S. films.
Heavily pierced and heavily tattooed, the actresses played her gaunt and Goth with a seriously bad attitude and advanced computer hacking skills to capture a character loved by many fans and book reviewers as a strikingly unique twist on the traditionally mellower heroine.
Noomi Rapace played Lisbeth in the Swedish movies, and Rooney Mara just as effectively plays the title role in Fincher’s new film. Pick either as your favorite in the middle of a group of fans of the films or the book by the late Stieg Larsson, and you’ll start an argument, trust me.
Back to the U.S.-made movie.
Fincher fairly faithfully follows the book’s major plot lines, minus a minor twist near the end.
Fincher fans will love his choice of the menacing version by Trent Reznor and Karen O of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” (”We come from the land of the ice and snow”) behind a series of oozing images of dark metal, sleek leather and extreme close-ups of body parts in the opening credits.
Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won the Oscar for Best Original Score for Fincher’s Oscar-nominated “The Social Network,” came together again to produce the eerily compelling score that carries the audience from a gray urban Stockholm to a starker, rural setting somewhere north of Stockholm where much of the film’s plot takes place.
“The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” is a murder mystery with a busy plot that often plunges into violence. There is rape, and there is torture. It’s not a book or movie for children.
Mikael Blomkvist, as the 65 million-plus readers of Larsson’s books already know, is an honest journalist who has just been humiliated by a corporate crook who won a case against him in court.
He is also a ladies’ man who just can’t help falling into bed with women when he’s not chasing corporate malfeasance for his magazine. His married publisher, played with equally cool charm by Robin Wright, is a long-time lover.
Larsson wrote three “Girl” books, and the second book, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” already has been made into a movie in Sweden. A film is expected to soon be in production in the U.S.
Craig plays Mikael well, comfortable around women, but just as attentive piecing together the small, unsexy clues.
Knowing about his disgrace in court, and aided by a background check by the hacker Lisbeth, Henrik Vanger, played with a welcome dry wit by Christopher Plummer, hires away Mikael to investigate a murder mystery.
His favorite niece Harriet, who liked to give her uncle a framed, pressed flower each year, disappeared 40 years ago. She was murdered, Vanger tells Mikael, but her murderer insists on sending him a pressed flower every year to taunt him.
Mikael is intrigued, and accepts Vanger’s offer of a small cabin in an isolated community populated mostly by Vanger’s despicable relatives, some of them unrepentant old Nazis. Could one of them have killed Harriet?
It’s only about halfway through the movie (and it was about halfway through the book, too) that Mikael meets Lisbeth after discovering that she hacked his computer in doing that earlier background check on him. Mikael travels back to Stockholm to tell her, “I want you to help me catch a killer of women.”
The audience by now already knows that Lisbeth will say yes because the audience has been following the multiple plot lines involving Lisbeth and Mikael that unravel outside the presence of the other.
Lisbeth is mugged, and she gives back a beating, so we know she can take it. She has a history of trouble with the law, so she has a state guardian who has suffered a stroke. She has to approach a new state guardian played with calm malevolence by Yorick van Wageningen, and she is forced to submit to his violence. A second visit results in worse violence, but Lisbeth gets her revenge.
She loathes men who prey on women, and she has experienced it first hand in such a frighteningly brutal way that her anti-social behavior, spiked hair and piercings become understandable. She wears them like armor.
Once Lisbeth and Mikael come together, the movie moves quickly from one ah-ha moment to the next horrific revelation to more gruesome revelations.
After sudden, gripping twists and a jolt of action, the audience is quickly yanked back down by a calmer, somehwat pedestrian tie-the-ends-together final few minutes.
Maybe a breather is in order before Lisbeth brings us along for another dark crusade against men who hate women in the already anticipated next Hollywood take on “The Girl Who Played with Fire.”
