The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo
Directed By:
David Fincher
Written By: Steve
Zallian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson
Starring: Daniel
Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright
Director of Photography: Jeff Cronenweth, Editors: Kirk
Baxter and Angus Wall, Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt, Original Music:
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Rated: R for hard
violence, rape, and all the other stuff to support your anti-holiday cheer.
The
pitch-perfect sequence in David Fincher’s The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also one of the most
unmemorable sequences in the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig)
is led around the yard outside the mansion of millionaire Henrik Vagner
(Christopher Plummer), who has changed Blomkvist with investigating his family.
Henrik explains each member of his family, where they live, and who talks to
who. But Mr. Fincher’s camera refuses to let our eyes process this information.
He cuts to shots of each home of each family member, and refuses to orient the
spatial relationship of these homes to each other, just that they all surround
each other. This reflects not only the script’s suggestions that the closest
people to us are often the ones that hurt us the most, but more so, Fincher’s deconstruction of the investigative process. The textual information
is displayed concretely and without flourish, but because the director refuses
to reinforce each detail with visual information, we remain lost to the
mystery.
If
Zodiac, Fincher’s cult classic masterpiece
about the true-life serial killer in San Francisco, was all about making
audience as obsessive as the characters solving an unknown case, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does the
opposite. The answer to the central mystery is slapping us in the face, but
because Fincher constantly disorients us with his bold and anti-genre
compositions, it remains more of a character piece. And thus, the American
director of Fight Club and The Social Network has done the best job
he can in adapting the tepid, international best-seller by Stieg Larsson. Why
the Swedish novels became an extravaganza still remains something of a
mystery—the narratives are built on the same twist-heavy lackluster prose that
launched Dan Brown, but include intense violence and rape as well. Perhaps
thought, that comes down to the film’s titular character, here played by Rooney
Mara (last seen breaking up with Mark Zuckerberg in the opening of The Social Network).
The
pretty Mara, playing Lisbaeth Salander, is unrecognizable here, spouting spiked
tar-black hair and a similar colored wardrobe to match, not to speak of
numerous piercings. Salander is a social outcast, not only legally (she’s a
ward of the state), but also in her demeanor. Unlike the fast-talking
Zuckerberg, Salander remains silent. When pressed to give her personal opinion
on a matter, she refuses, before awkwardly discussing the sexual tendencies of
the client she investigated.
It’s
a shame that Steve Zallian, who adapted Larsson’s novel, couldn’t stray
further from the novel’s main mystery. Salander and Blomkvist never meet for
over an hour (and the film runs close to three). While Blomkvist, attempting to
escape after a libel suit leaves him penniless, solves the mystery of a missing
girl on an isolated island, Salander must instead battle her psychiatrist who
sexually abuses her in some quite intense sequences. However, as fans of the
novel (and the simplistic Swedish films) will know, Salander takes her revenge
and then some, and it’s here that Mara turns Lisabeth from an outcast to
both the inevitable outcome of decades of institutionalized misogyny and a dark
and twisted version of feminism.
Lisabeth’s
revenge still feels like the climax of the film, because it is certainly the
most satisfying sequence in the film (as well as the one that will create
plenty of audience members to hide their eyes), but soon she joins Blomkvist in
his search to find who killed the young girl over forty years ago. Casting Craig, a paragon of masculinity, in the role of the ineffective journalist can
be seen as miscasting, but also Fincher playing with out knowledge of star
persona. While he does solve some of the intricacies of the case, it is
Lisabeth who is able to make the links needed. When the two later end up more
than just detectives, it is Lisabeth who is not just riding on top, but appears
to be thrusting into his body.
These
kind of details, visual more than scripted, prove Fincher’s control over
the camera, and his meticulous work appears throughout his tightly framed shots
along with slow Stedicam pans. The director feels like a scientist dissecting
rats in a maze, not emotionally distant necessarily, but like peeling an onion,
trying to discover what’s inside. Bringing together DP Jeff Cronenweth and
editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (who all worked on The Social Network), Fincher constantly creates a smooth rhythm
to the narrative, always leaving more details in the frame than we might get
with a more standard director (or certainly Niels Oplev, director of the
Swedish original). The film presents a series of dark blacks and blinding
whites, and when Salander notices a smudge of a bright red on the palette of
the camera, she amusingly and self-consciously wipes it off. Not every decision
is perfect, however, and one involving a song by Enya during a crucially campy
sequence will certainly be discussed for years in complete confusion.
I
wish though, Fincher and Zallian could make up for what is an awfully
slight mystery. The narrative twists of Larsson’s novel seem to small and
too silly for Fincher, and although he gives the dialogue a good spark of
pace through the editing pattern, there is no way to overcome what the contents
of that dialogue contain. Blomkvist and Salander are unique outcasts in a world
of corruption, and Craig and Mara fit wonderfully together by exposing
each other’s ticks and tocks, but the mystery they must solve is much less
interesting than their personal demons they’ve left behind. As the extremely
bold, almost parody, credits sequences suggests, these are two heroes born out
of both a world of technology and increasing corruption, whether financial,
political, or social.
But
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is
all about playing with our expectations. Male star Craig becomes second
fiddle to the unknown, and Mara goes from innocent female sidekick to the
real story. The sounds of the score (by Social
Network duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) are both brooding, but often
sound like a broken music box. This is a fairy tale gone horribly wrong, but
perhaps, it’s the only story we can have for a day like today.
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