The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
DIRECTED BY DAVID FINCHER
Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish-language adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, released in Canada just last year, was a slick, salacious crime thriller reminiscent of a Hollywood production. It’s little surprise that David Fincher’s version duly supplies genuine, studio-financed slickness in spades, but even his craftsmanship can only do so much to elevate the inherent trashiness of Stieg Larsson’s sordid subject matter.
Specifically, via healthy helpings of rape, ritual murder, and rudimentary sleuthing, Dragon Tattoo pruriently establishes Sweden as a festering bastion of fascism, misogyny, and injustice. It’s thanks to an instance of the latter that disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is convinced to pursue a sideline in private investigation by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), the aging custodian of the family-held industrial empire that “built modern Sweden.” With his reputation in tatters after losing a libel suit, Blomkvist agrees to scrutinize the evidence relating to the unsolved 1966 disappearance of Henrik’s great-niece, only to discover that a history of Nazi collaboration is among the least appalling of the Vanger clan’s sins. To help crack the case, he enlists the aid of titular anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander (a tart, liberally-pierced Rooney Mara, always in all-black everything), who’d sooner hack through military-grade encryption than hug another living soul.
As much as Fincher’s meticulous compositions and the grimly atmospheric score from Oscar-winning duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Mara’s excellent performance helps to save the Columbia-backed redux from feeling entirely superfluous. Still, like her director, she’s also beholden to certain problematic elements within the source material. In particular, an early rape-revenge subplot, as in the Swedish film, feels gratuitous and slightly at odds with Dragon Tattoo‘s purported feminism. Not only is this thread resolved rather too glibly, but its primary function seems to be to provide Salander with a crude avenging affinity with a series of victims brought to light by Blomkvist, as though she’s able to empathize with them only by virtue of having been brutalized herself.
As a general matter, psychological insight isn’t Dragon Tattoo‘s greatest strength, whether with respect to the evidently “damaged” Salander, or to the cartoonish psychopath that eventually emerges as the villain of the piece. It’s lurid and lightweight, but also undeniably well-made—the sort of film one might describe as a “guilty pleasure,” if it wasn’t so thoroughly unpleasant.