Newsletter: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Newsletter: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The original title of the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was Men Who Hated Women. Granted, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is catchy title and more imaginative than the original title, but the original is to the point and accurate. It is particularly true in the first novel in the series. Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading investigative journalist, a man with considerable appeal to the opposite sex, and Lizbeth Salander, a leather-clad world-classed hacker and rabid individualist who has been the victim of male outrage more than a few times in her young life, combined forces to track down a serial killer that is a member of a prominent wealthy but twisted Swedish family. This member has a pattern of kidnapping young girls, prostitutes, immigrants, runaways, and brutally torturing them before he kills them, almost like a sport, a pastime, with utter disregard for them as human beings. There’s also incest in the family and a liking for Hitler and Nazism. Larsson juxtaposes this corrupt and decadent family against the virtuous two investigators who are on the side of the angels, even if in an eccentric way. After the three movies were made for Swedish television, and were a great success, here as well as in Europe, the American director who specializes in dark, psychological dramas, David Fincher, decided to take on Dragon Tattoo, which was a year in the making and was released just before Christmas in 2011.

First let me state I have read all three novels, the first one twice, and I have seen all three Swedish movies twice. In other words, I have pretty well soaked up the narrative and the characters, and I can’t tell you how much admiration I have for Lizbeth Salander. For me she has become the paradigm for the kick-ass female, replacing the likes of Wonder Woman, mixing a fiery sense of revenge against males who have abused her, with a photographic memory, and a brilliance on the computer—an up-to-date heroine cast by talent and technology to take on the patriarchy in its many forms while remaining an ultra-independent person.

I came to Fincher’s film with an open mind. It is, cinematically, more satisfying than the TV movies. It was shot with more authority and a better eye for detail and composition, and with a dark atmosphere that approaches that of a horror film, which was fitting considering the last part of the film. There were some echoes of Seven when dealing with the photographs of the dead girls.

I thought Daniel Craig and newcomer Rooney Mara had good chemistry. Rooney has a more womanly body then Noomi Repace, the actress who plays Lizbeth in the Swedish movies; she is not so slight of frame, nor so flat chested, which struck me as a plus. The look they gave Mara is rather ghoulish: pale grey skin, as if it was against her religion to be exposed to sunlight. Mara has since been nominated for an Oscar for her performance, quite an achievement for someone who had never starred in major film. But despite all this hoopla Miss Rapace’s performance tends to pop up first when I think about the story on film. Perhaps it’s just the fact she was in all three movies and has therefore carved a deeper niche in my mind. In the final analysis I think both women did a fantastic job.