Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

       Hollywood has a long tradition of making films based on books. When Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became a best-seller and then a successful Swedish film, there was no doubt that Hollywood would take a crack at a film adaptation. The biggest difference between telling a story in text versus telling a story in film is imagery. While a book can spend paragraphs describing the intricacy of a piece of clothing or a hand carved desk, a movie can just show it to you. Because of a busy work schedule, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo slowly over the course of a few weeks. Seeing the events of the book take place over the course of a couple hours was a little shocking. “He's on Hedeby already?” I thought to myself, but looking back the brisk pacing was just the director's choice to expedite the story to get the good stuff at the end of the story.

       If you haven't read the book, here's the basic plot. Mikhael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig) is a prominent journalist in Sweden who has just been convicted of libel. He is hired by an elderly millionaire named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to try to solve the mystery of what happened to his niece Harriet Vanger who disappeared on the family island 40 years ago. On the day that Harriet disappeared, there was an accident on the only bridge going to and from the island, so she couldn't have runaway or been kidnapped. The only conclusion is that she was murdered by someone on the island. The only people Henrik believes has motive are the members of his own family. Many of the Vangers are unsavory, some have ties to corruption while others are known Nazi sympathizers. But the evidence doesn't point to anyone in particular. To help Blomqvist with his work, he hires Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the titular girl with the dragon tattoo. Salander is thin, stark, haunted, and with a look that crosses goth with S&M, she is fearsomely intelligent and emotionally stranded. She is a skilled computer hacker with a troubled past that has lead her to be a ward of the state despite being in her twenties and having a steady job. Early in the movie she is sexually assaulted, not once but twice, giving her plenty of personal motive to help Blomqvist track down this killer of women.

       Rooney Mara is a force on screen, showing a wide range of emotions, while portraying one of literature's most memorable contemporary characters, and she was justly nominated for Best Actress. The only issue with her performance, which holds for the film as a whole, is that she is too confident. She's such a strong character that she lacks the vulnerability that is suggested in the novel. The same can be said of Daniel Craig, who exudes the confidence of James Bond, as well as the direction of David Fincher. The film moves along so briskly that we don't really get a sense of the struggle with the case that Blomqvist had in the novel and is insecurities related to it. However the screenplay is otherwise strong that it is easy to look past this. The script stays relatively true to the novel, with only one major difference, that honestly still confuses me a little. The cinematography captures the harsh wilderness of northern Sweden as well as adding to the sense of danger in the story. The soundtrack does this as well with music by Nine Inch Nail frontman Trent Reznor, who worked with both Fincher and Mara on The Social Network. This is a good, intriguing mystery movie, but if you have the time, read the book instead.