"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
is a compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of
having a heroine more fascinating than the story. She's a 24-year-old
goth girl named Lisbeth Salander, with body piercings and tattoos: thin,
small, fierce, damaged, a genius computer hacker. She smokes to quiet
her racing heart.
Lisbeth is as compelling as any movie character in recent memory. Played by Noomi Rapace
with an unwavering intensity, she finds her own emotional needs
nurtured by the nature of the case she investigates, the disappearance
of a young girl 40 years earlier. As this case is revealed as part of a
long-hidden pattern of bizarre violence against women, memories of her
own abused past return with a vengeance.
Rapace makes the character compulsively interesting. She plays against a passive fortysomething hero, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist),
an investigative journalist who has six months of freedom before
beginning a prison sentence for libel against a Swedish tycoon. Mikael,
resourceful and intelligent, is hired by an elderly billionaire named
Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube),
who inhabits a gloomy mansion on a remote island and broods about the
loss of his beloved niece Harriet. She vanished one day when the island
was cut off from the mainland. Her body was never found. Because the
access bridge was blocked, the killer must have been a member of
Vanger's large and greedy family, which he hates. Three brothers were
Nazi sympathizers during the war.
The notion of a murder with a
limited list of suspects was conventional even before Agatha Christie.
Niels Arden Oplev's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" pays it lip
service, with Mikael covering a wall with photos of the suspects. But
this is a new age, and in addition to his search of newspaper and legal
archives, he uses the Internet. That's how he comes across Lisbeth, who
has been investigating him. She's described as Sweden's best
hacker, a claim we have no reason to doubt, and the intensity of her
focus, contrasted to her walled-off emotional life, suggests Asperger's.
They
team up on the case, and might become lovers if not for Mikael's
diffidence and her secretive hostility. They become efficient partners.
Scenes involving newspaper photographs and Internet searches create
sequences like a "Blow-Up"
for the digital age. The film is unique in my memory for displaying
screen shots of an actual computer operating system, Mac OS X, and
familiar programs like e-mail and iPhoto. Ever notice how most movie
computers work like magic?
The forbidding island setting, the
winter chill, the frosty inhabitants, all combine with dread suspicions
to create an uncommonly effective thriller. It's longer than average,
but not slow, not after we become invested in the depravity of the case.
There are scenes involving rape, bondage and assault that are stronger
than most of what serves in the movies for sexual violence, but these
scenes are not exploitation. They have a ferocious feminist orientation,
and although "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" seems a splendid title,
the original Swedish title was the stark "Men Who Hate Women."
The novel, one of a trilogy which Stieg Larsson
completed before his untimely death at 44 in 2004, was an international
best-seller. It is destined to be remade by Hollywood. That remake may
turn out to be a good film, but if I were you I'd be sure to watch this
version. The Hollywood version will almost certainly tone down the
sexual violence. I can't think of an American actress who could play
Lisbeth. Kristen Stewart, who I respect, has been mentioned. Dakota Fanning. I dunno. A younger Jodie Foster, maybe. Someone able to play hard as nails and emotionally unavailable. Make her a Swede, and simply cast Noomi Rapace.
This
is not a deep psychological study. But it's a sober, grown-up film. It
has action, but not the hyperkinetic activity that passes for action in
too many American movies. It has sex, but not eroticism. Its male lead
is brave and capable, but not macho. Its female lead is sexy in the
abstract, perhaps, but not seductive or alluring. This is a movie about
characters who have more important things to do than be characters in an
action thriller.
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