Photo Gallery
With its dark, brooding tone, transgressive cynicism, and grotesque approach to labyrinthine mystery, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is perfectly suited for the traditional, anti-Oscar version of David Fincher. Representative of the ironic punk visionary that he is, this film is aggressive and attitudinal, smothering the audience with moodiness and dread, applying impeccable visual elegance to sequences of gothic murders, heinous acts of sexual violence, and the most coldly intimate love story you will see all year. Often it feels as though this was Fincher's escape from the awards machine, and his meticulous-yet-carefree stylistic indulgence functions as a middle finger to the traditions that put him through the campaign ringer for The Social Network last year.
His source material is equally non-conformist -- though not necessarily on purpose. Truth be told, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an oddly structured, unwieldy epic that blends a deeply convoluted thriller plot with two intriguing character studies, then fuses the character studies into an anachronistic partner-in-crime romance. Based on the first of three books that make up Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which are widely popular but hardly celebrated works of literature, the procedural nature of the mystery investigation often feels discordant with the sharper intimacy of the characters. But Fincher -- working from a screenplay adapted by Steven Zaillian -- seems to appreciate that odd imbalance, since it affords him the opportunity to let the subtext slip through the many holes in the plot. He forces the cold, investigatory material to act as a frame for deeper character subtleties.
Those subtleties must be extracted meticulously from the vestiges of a plot that is set up as a perfunctory whodunit. Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a disgraced left-wing journalist who is furtively ushered to the cold, desolate island owned by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), aging patriarch of a wealthy family dynasty, to investigate the disappearance and presumed murder of his young niece Harriet, an unsolved crime that has haunted the family for 40 years. As he digs through the tumultuous family history -- via decades worth of photos, endless piles of documents, scores of newspaper clippings, and uncomfortable encounters with the surviving members of this disturbingly fractured family -- Blomkvist uncovers a string of grisly murders that may include Harriet...and may be linked to one of the unsavory Vanger family heirs.
All this, and yet we still barely know the eponymous "Girl." The film is oddly structured like that, introducing its leads but keeping them separate while the story's many disparate strands percolate. The titular heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), is slowly woven into the film in short bursts, only taking center stage after the surface plot is laid out in detail. She's an angry, vicious, isolated computer genius capable of obtaining details about virtually anyone. She is also -- in the wake of an enigmatic but clearly tortured past -- one who is hell-bent on fighting harsh brutality with even harsher brutality.
When Blomkvist and Salander finally meet, in the film's extended third act, their dynamic is off-kilter in an intriguing way. He is simply a journalist embroiled in a massive scandal, but she is drawn into the investigation with fierce bloodlust, as if a psychic line connects these heinous crimes to the many sins committed against her. Lisbeth is determined to make this "killer of women" pay not only for the killings of these specific women, but for crimes perpetrated against all women.
The hint of that subtext far outweighs the intrigue of the surface plot, though it does unfold in a spectacular series of investigatory sequences, culminating in a climax, scored to the perfect ironic use of Enya's Orinoco Flow, that illuminates the off-kilter power balance between Salander and Blomkvist -- really, between Salander and all men. Mara is extraordinary in this already-iconic role, embodying the brokenness and vulnerability of the physically diminutive Salander as well as the punk misanthropy and explosive ferocity that counterbalances that small physicality. Her chemistry with Craig is at once awkwardly kinky and curiously sweet, suggesting that in the right context, Salander's soul can be slowly lured from the wreckage of her past.
In Fincher's (and Zaillian's) hands, the story extends from the ending many of us may remember. While the original 2009 Swedish film went out on a note of slick suggestion, this version attaches an extended epilogue that deepens the Salander-Blomkvist relationship, tying most of the plot's loose ends but allowing the emotional attachments to linger in tormented uncertainty. There is a clear depth of intimacy beneath the overtly prickly exterior, something entirely missing from the original films that enriches the characters and promises to probe ever deeper in future installments. Fincher is certainly happy to unleash his inner punk once again in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but he is very clearly seeking to explore that punk's wounded soul.
