David Fincher’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the hit novel by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is the third time the book has been brought to the screen, and it is hard to think of any other director who could infuse the franchise with this much new excitement. Fincher is coming off of The Social Network, but it is Fincher’s handling of Fight Club and Se7en that promises a Dragon Tattoo marked with the director’s particular brand of energetic, neo-noir grime.
The new Dragon Tattoo is decidedly more excited than the Swedish versions, and it kicks off with a James Bond-like montage of inky black paint dripping and spilling across the screen as the razor-sharp titles zip around to the pounding soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The credit sequences promises that Fincher will lend due attention to both the novel’s unique style and sex appeal.
Unlike the Swedish version, this movie skips through Larsson’s sluggish prologue. We meet journalist hero Mikael Blomkvist, who has just been run through the legal ringer by a powerful Swedish businessman and is offered an escape from the spotlight by the patriarch of the Vanger family, who wants the acclaimed, if maligned, reporter to investigate a decades-old disappearance of a Vanger daughter. Then there’s Salander, a leather-clad, goth hacker, who is hired by the Vangers for the background check on Blomkvist. We don’t spend as much time in Salander’s underworld as we do in the Swedish films, but we learn the essentials. Salander is a custodian of the state, and her new case officer is a sadistic prick who forces her to perform sexual acts on him to have access to her money. He eventually rapes her in Dragon Tattoo’s most graphic and talked-about scene.
While the novel and the movie are ostensibly about the mystery Blomkvist sets to unravel, it often seems the whole point of Dragon Tattoo is to get this unlikely couple — the journalist and the hacker — together. They eventually team up when Salander is recommended to Blomkvist as a research assistant, and Salander is attracted to the gig because it involves investigating a sexual crime. That’s what drives Salander, who is a kind of black phoenix rising from the ashes of her own abuse to reign down fire on abusers. With the Vanger family, Salander finds a whole island of predators of the worst kind, ex-Nazis and wealthy industrialists who hide a history of incestuous abuse. Perhaps Larsson’s most ingenious stroke is placing these various unknowns in expensive houses dotting snow-covered hills on the remote island. There are threats everywhere, sleeping cats, and we wait for one — or all — to pounce.
Fincher’s pacing is brisk, brisker than the previous films, and he makes sure to keep the story ahead of the audience. The counter, though, is that he adds little emotional weight to the mystery story, and, compared to the Swedish version, this movie isn’t as rich in the textures or tones of the remote Swedish environment. Part of this has to do with how Fincher handles the mystery of the missing girl, which almost plays out as an afterthought. The isolation of the Vanger estate isn’t as pronounced, and the dried flowers, which drove home the feeling of a deep diabolical undercurrent in the Swedish film, are shot here in antiseptic fashion, neatly arrange and drained of feeling. Fincher’s movie is a tad over-polished given its thematic content, filled with neat, sepia flashbacks and crisp shiny images. Details and clues are raised and quickly digested or employed; no need to dwell.
The flip side of Fincher’s approach is that he is able to add more weight to the character of Lisbeth Salander, who is his real focus. Rooney Mara’s Salander gets her own acrobatic action sequence when a thug tries to steal her purse in the subway, helping to establish her as a more volatile, sharper-edged hero. She doesn’t seethe as much as Noomi Rapace’s Salander, and she seems more prone to strike. Likewise, Craig’s Blomkvist is more potent than Michael Nyqvist’s bookish incarnation, which makes him less convincing as a journalist, but more interesting as narrative force. When Craig slips into the sleek, modern interior of one of the Vanger family’s homes, the tension is increased by a sense that the character can hold his own and is not just a sitting duck.
What Fincher seems to get most right in his interpretation of Larsson’s story, though, is that he understands that the central relationship between Blomkvist and Salander is Dragon Tattoo’s real focus. In Fincher’s version, the surrounding intrigue — from the sexual assault of Salander to the history of rape uncovered through the investigation of the Vangers — frames an elusive central dynamic between the writer and his dragon girl.
So what to make about the journalist and his investigative partner? On the surface, the explanation for their attraction seems simple enough. Blomkvist is a singular good man in a world filled with sexual predators. This one-dimensional reading of the relationship, however, detracted from the Swedish films. Fincher, on the other hand, seems keen on calling attention to the peculiar nature of the sexual dynamics at work in Larsson’s story, which we can see in how the director shoots the movie’s two graphic sex scenes. In the first, the rape, we see Salander’s bare backside, complete with dragon tattoo, as she rives and squeals, tied to the bed. Later, it is the same bare back and the same dragon-like undulation, a pulsing Salander who has pounced on an unsuspecting Blomkvist. In both scenes, sex is a mechanistic thing, not an arena of emotional expression or exchange, but part of a shifting dynamic of victimhood. Through these scenes, Fincher acutely focuses us on the essential allure of Larsson’s dangerous, if seductive world, a setting within which you must learn to dominate or be dominated.
