What you really need to know about David Fincher's adaptation of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" is that it effectively brings the scares. That's not the last word on the movie, nor is it necessarily the paramount concern, but it was
one of mine. Merry Christmas to me (and in fact, I did see this movie on Christmas Day, with family, and we wouldn't have it any other way. "Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows" will just have to wait.)
In case you still haven't gotten around to either the Stieg Larsson book or its vast fields of spoilers, a quick summary: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played here by Daniel Craig) takes a private job allegedly working on a family biography for industrial baron Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) but actually investigating the disappearance of his niece (played in flashback by Moa Garpendal, listed about 27th on IMDb for this movie), which Vanger believes to have been a murder; in his research Blomkvist enlists the help of Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, double football legacy and girl who dumps Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of
"The Social Network"), a professional hacker and ward of the state.
Discerning whether this version could effectively bring the scares was important to me because I've already experienced "Dragon Tattoo"'s chain of events twice, once on the page and once onscreen. I saw the
Swedish "Dragon Tattoo" two years ago, but luckily had one of my sisters (who had seen it more recently) to remind me of the stylistic differences between the Swedish version, which in retrospect looks like an episode of "SVU," and Fincher with full artistic guns blazing. He shoots the flashbacks to 1960s Sweden in a yellowy wash reminiscent of
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", but underlined with notes of malice to keep viewers from wanting to linger in those seemingly idyllic pictures. The present scenes are often washed in blue, echoing the distance Blomkvist is putting between himself, his professional failures, his lover and his Stockholm life as he delves back into the past. There is a retread of the famous "Zodiac" into-the-basement sequence, chased by an unforgettable sound cue that makes a creepy moment even more chilling; the rest of the Trent Reznor/ Atticus Ross soundtrack is effective without being intrusive.
That scene-setting is important, but sometimes it overwhelms the performances -- particularly Daniel Craig as Blomkvist, already muted in efforts (I assume) to make his character more sympathetic. We've seen Craig as "blunt instrument" James Bond, but here he's turned down so far that the occasional outburst looks out of place on him. I would never have thought that he would bring less sex appeal to his role than his Swedish counterpart, being both younger and better-looking, but there you go. Plummer is underused (I read that in deference to his age, he shot on set for just 2 weeks), although part of that is related to the source material and how it employs Henrik Vanger as another hammer in the plot's mechanism. Mara is great -- her Salander, more avoidant than Noomi Rapace's aggressive characterization, shifts uneasily between modes of behavior in just the right ways -- but she's being given too much credit for bringing a great character to life. (Also, true or false: Is it easier for a mostly-unknown actress to lose herself in a role?) In a more conventional thriller tale this wouldn't be a problem, but we linger on characterization long enough -- the super first meeting between Blomkvist and Salander coming to mind -- for it to pull away a bit.
There's another troublesome sequence in "Dragon Tattoo" I can't quite let go of, which I don't want to spoil but it involves a series of very violent images, rapidly processed, and one that the camera lingers on that
almost belies the point the movie's trying to make. For that, but for a few other reasons, I'd like to catch it again in a few weeks to either confirm or overturn my initial impressions -- and decide whether the Steven Zaillian script collapses the 800-plus pages of the source as efficiently as possible (as it originally seemed). I can only guess that the reason this movie didn't do better over the holiday weekend is because of its graphic violence and sex, both of which wouldn't come as a shock to the many moviegoers who read DRAGON TATTOO first. How anyone can prefer the torture of
"Chipwrecked" is beyond my understanding.
