The American re-make of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, while stylish and thick with detail, isn’t as solid a film as you might have hoped. Read why below!
I’ll get the necessary disclaimer (is it necessary?) out of the way first: No, I have not read the books that were source material for this film, and no I have not watched any of the 3 (from what I understand rather good) Swedish films that were also based on the book series. That said, should you really need a back story or an understanding of source material before going into a movie like this? Or should a movie stand alone as its own criteria for judgment and enjoyment? For me, a movie should be able to stand on its own, providing an audience with something that can be understood (or at least an idea that can be contemplated) without any outside pieces or necessary extras. Sure, a movie can be a lot of fun if you’ve got a little something more on your mental plate going in, but that same thing can completely ruin an experience and leave you exiting the theater angry that the film didn’t live up to this or that from your outside source.
Here’s the story as I understood it, from one viewing, without any other window through which to see the material. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is centered around Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), an investigative journalist who’s just lost a large chunk (if not all) of his life’s savings to a lawsuit in which he’s been accused of libel. As an unexpected avenue to get away from the pressure and political nature of his job, and as a way to possibly get back at those who are persecuting him, Mikael accepts an invitation to a small Swedish island where he meets an older man named Henrik Vagner (Christopher Plummer). The elderly Vagner proposes that Mikael stay on the island while his libel business blows over and help solve the murder mystery of Henrik’s grandaughter that’s been aging for 40 years. Mikael is soon interviewing and investigating various inhabitants of the island and surrounding area, most of whom are Vagner family members, as he slowly and systematically paints his picture of the dysfunctional family.
Halfway through the film Mikael teams up with the anti-social computer savvy Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). She’s dysfunctional in her own right, and I’m not going to go into any detail about her story. The girl has been through some craziness, and by the time she meets Mikael we’ve learned that she’s got some talent when it comes to digging up people’s dirty secrets, has a few dirty secrets of her own, and is a woman you don’t mess with. Mikael needs an assistant to help him wade through all the sordid details of the last 40 years of Vagner family history, and Lisbeth works for the company who the Vagners hired to find Mikael to help them. Don’t worry, it’s pretty simple once everything’s laid out on screen, so don’t let my explanation muddle things up. When all is said and done, we see Mikael and Lisbeth working together (and more; yes there’s full frontal nudity) to discover the truth.
So, how was the movie? It’s a pretty solid mystery, and I was along for the ride most of the way, but honestly I was kind of disappointed in the end. I’ve been a big David Fincher fan since my angsty teenage man years when I watched Fight Club every week. I was a little surprised to discover he’d also directed Alien 3, which wasn’t great for the series but still had its place in the trio of movies that were (and still are in my opinion) the Alien movies. (We won’t go in to AVP 1 & 2, or include the awesome looking Prometheus that’s coming out next year. We just won’t) Seven was dark, dreary, and fantastically morose, and I need to watch it again soon. But Fincher’s newer movies (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and now The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) have just been a little flat and uninteresting for me. While he’s known, and popular, for getting gritty and downright dirty with the tone and feel of his films, you’ve just got to have a little more substance to capture today’s engaged audience members. You can have ground-breaking CGI (Benjamin Button comes to mind), exceptional cinematography and sense of style, but a movie doesn’t really resonate as more than what’s selling at the moment unless you give me something worth holding on to. I’m sorry to say, while the movie has grown on me a little, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just wasn’t one I came away loving.
I won’t lie, like I said, I enjoyed the mystery up until a point. After that point though everything just seemed to be a little paint-by-numbers and it became more of a generic thriller complete with a bad-guy-explaining-his-plan scene. And it had so much potential! There’s an amazing opening credits sequence that gave me goose bumps, it was that cool, but the rest of the film just didn’t live up to that opening sequence. Rooney Mara is exceptional as Lisbeth Salander, no question about it, and Daniel Craig is pretty good at playing Daniel Craig. But the entirety of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just didn’t stand up to the little pieces that I enjoyed. After above said tipping point, the story’s mystery and sense of purpose just sort of evaporated and everything got real straight-forward, real quick. There’s literally a moment near the end when the main character says something like “Oh wait, there could be this” completely out of the blue and that’s how the mystery is solved. I almost laughed out loud. Seriously. It wasn’t hinted at, and once the mystery is solved things just wrapped up in a soft, very non-Fincheresque fashion.
While I’ll probably give The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo another watch, and possibly even pick up a copy when it drops below $10, I can’t really give it the “you’re going into my collection for sure” stamp of approval. I went with a friend who’d come in on the opposite end of the spectrum as me, having seen all 3 Swedish films and having thoroughly enjoyed the books. When the credits started to roll he had a “huh, that’s it?” sort of grin on his face, and explained to me that the ending has been changed quite a bit, and some details that he enjoyed from the book were left out of the movie. But like I said I don’t think these tidbits should be necessary going into a movie like this. On its own merits, I think David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was just a little too flat, when what I expected/wanted was a kick-in-the-face burns-down-the-throat sort of a movie.