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).
