Review of David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig.
The much-anticipated The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is here, bringing the story told in the late Stieg Larsson’s best-selling mystery novel and in the Swedish film adaptation to the rest of us who still didn’t know the story. Meanwhile, fans of the dark tale can be reassured that it’s being adapted by David Fincher, the director who both entertained and disturbed us in Fight Club, Seven and Zodiac.
From its creepy opening animation set to a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” singing about “the land of the ice and snow,” the movie puts you know inside a rather cold and dark world. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is disgraced after he’s been found to have libeled the head of a major corporation. Knowing he may need redemption, an elderly millionaire (Christopher Plummer) summons Mikael to help him solve a mystery that’s haunted him for decades – his beloved niece vanished decades ago, the same night a grisly car wreck happened on the bridge to the family estate/island. Mikael moves into the guest house in the dead of winter and has his life intertwine with the extended family that lives there – both the benevolent and the ones who were actually Nazis.
But it’s not the white supremacists and missing girls that give the story its dark edge – it’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo herself Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara. Lisbeth has a troubled past and a disturbing present – she’s a ward of the state struggling to make ends meet and having to perform sexual favors for the money she’s due. But she’s also something of a computer and investigative savant, and she’s hired by Mikael to assist in the movie’s central mystery.
Mara is a relative newcomer, but a comparison of her publicity head shots to the pale, pierced tattooed Lisbeth lead us to assume she’s immersed herself in the role. It’s not just on the surface – beyond looking like a miniature Marilyn Manson, Mara transforms into a dark and complex emotional creature. She’s cold, blunt and off-putting – except in some moments in the first act where her performance turns astonishingly raw. At the risk of speaking for those who have actually read the book, one can’t help but think readers found their Lisbeth.
Once they’re together, we’re invested in following this unlikely crime-solving team in finding what happened to the missing girl. The investigative process can be spellbinding, and the moments of violence are original and shocking. The mood is set just right by the music of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who also worked with Fincher on The Social Network The story is a good solid mystery, and Mikael and Lisbeth are a good solid team.
Fincher may feel a little too much loyalty to the team though – at 2 ½ hours the movie is just a little too long, with a lengthy epilogue that feels tacked on. It resolves some dangling plot points that were okay being left dangled and seems to be more about Mikael and Lisbeth’s relationship than it does the main plot. Fincher may be trying to get as much of the novel in as he can, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first in a trilogy of books and the first in a series of films – which means the relationship can be worked on in subsequent films.
Fincher’s attempt to satisfy Stieg Larsson fans could come at the price of displeasing his own fans. While making a movie to stay loyal to the novel, he makes a David Fincher-ish movie that isn’t quite up to Seven or Fight Club. Those movies blew us away at the end; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo goes a little past when it should have ended, so while it may reach a wide audience thanks to its source material, it may never have legendary status with fans of thrillers.
But you can’t judge the whole movie on its final twenty minutes. Ultimately, Tattoo will leave a mark on audiences – and we can hope Mikael, Lisbeth, Larsson and Fincher can take us to more dark places soon.