2010_6_22 The Tattoo that Roared
As Kai and I were leaving the theater after seeing “The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo” an old man with a slight tremor tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I had read the book. I told I had and I had started the second installment this morning. He had read all three already. “So what did you think of this film versus the book?” Without hesitation I said, “It is a bare bones travesty of the novel; the script left off a ton of stuff that made the book a more complete experience. “Yes,” he said, obviously confirmed in his own view.
They did boil the elements of the narrative down to their major highlights, while leaving out the connecting links, the slow mechanics of research and sleuthing, and minimizing the role of some characters, for the sake of brevity and compression. Now, this is standard practice in a movie based on a novel, but in this case some relevant material went begging, leaving the film a partial tracing of something much more complex. For example, Mikael Blomkvist two other female relationships, with Erika Berger, his co-editor and owner at MILLINIUM, the magazine both of them had started, and Ceilia Vanger, One of Henrik Vanger’s nieces, are barely mentioned. Lizbeth Salander, the girl with the tattoo, had a boss at Milton Security and her first Guardian; both were missing entirely. They were all cut out to focus in a lean and hungry way on the crime pattern which is, after all, the guts of the story.
I think I see why the book, the trilogy, has had such a phenomenal success. It pits two ‘Odd Couple’ sleuths against a wealthy and largely corrupt family and a shady financier who, with diligent research and imagination, the two amateur detectives bring down, the improbable victors on the side of truth, integrity and, in their fashion, liberal values. The Odd Couple is composed of Blomkvist, an investigative journalist, a conventional guy but a man dedicated to his profession, and the other a Goth female, always dressed in black, with black lipstick, rings in her nose, covered with tattoos, 25 years old, 4’ 11” & 90 lbs, very thin, flat-chested, and antisocial, with no social graces whatsoever, with a dark past of sexual abuse and god knows what else. She also happens to have a photographic memory; she is also a world class hacker and a brilliant researcher. Blomkvist is hired by 82 year old Henrik Vanger, the founder of the fortune and ex-CEO of the company, to investigate a cold case, the disappearance and probable murder of his favorite niece, Harriet Vanger, who vanished 36 years ago. The rest of the family is unhappy about this digging into family history and bitch about it from the get-go. Henrik knows the rest of the family is waiting for him to die; he knows how low-down and greedy they are—he doesn’t know the half of it.
Actually, Blomkvist and Salander are on parallel paths and don’t come together until page 320; once they come together the pace of the investigation picks up. Some old photographs provide then with the big break and they uncover the family demons; they discover not only sexual abuse, incest, and lingering Nazi sympathies involving dead and living brothers, but a gruesome history of serial killings of young women coming down to the present, approaching 25 t0 30 victims. In fact, the title of the movie in Swedish was “The Men Who Hated Women.” The CEO of the Vanger Business is Martin Vanger and he turns out to be the serial killer, picking up from where his father left off years ago. Their money and prestige protected them for decades. When Martin talks to Mikael about the murders he is furious with him for blowing his cover. He tells the journalist how he enjoyed torturing and snuffing out the lives of young women, most of them “prostitutes and immigrants, the kind of creatures no one would miss, and now you want to ruin my fun.”
The class element that emerges made me think of the case of Leopold and Loeb, the two bright rich boys in Chicago in the 1920s who killed a boy just for the fun of it and to see if they could get away with it. They were defended by Clarence Darrow in a famous trial. Martin, another rich prick with lust and murder as a pastime,
wanted to keep on butchering the “small people’ for amusement.
But it is Lizbeth Salander who is the star of the show. The actress is Noomi Rapace and she is perfect for the part; she has created a persona that rivals the Lizbeth in the novel. There is a rumor going around that David Fincher wants to do a version of the story, with maybe Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and Natalie Portman as Lizbeth. I don’t know, right now it hard to think someone else being Lizbeth, with that skinny little body and cold hard stare. Manohla Dargis her review in the New York Times called her a “devil doll.” Well, she figured out what Martin Vanger was under the gloss of a successful industrialist and because she did she was able saved Blomkvist from certain death. She was, when all was said and done, more guardian angel the devil doll.