A very dark, moody, tale of mystery from director Niels Arden Oplev, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the latest foreign films to get distribution in the US and start making the rounds in limited release. The current state of foreign releases in this country is a bit of a double-edged sword. We don’t get much, and it can be frustrating to people who want to consume all different kinds of cinema; but when we do get something you can rest assured that it had to have created a lot of buzz somehow in order for someone to pay to bring it over here. You can almost always count on a film from another country playing in an American theater to be well made, or at the very least interesting enough to be worth giving a try. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is no different. Adapted from the novel Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo plays out like a lot of the other serial killer centric thriller films that you have already seen, but it is presented with an intelligence and a touch of artistry that lifts it a notch above other entries in the genre and makes it a ride worth taking.
The story is set in a pretty standard mystery film location, a remote island somewhere in Sweden that can only be accessed by one bridge. If this seems a bit familiar, it’s probably because even just this last year both Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer have milked similar settings for drama and suspense. Initially, time is split between two parallel stories, those of an investigative reporter named Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) who has been framed for defrauding a very large corporation, and a gothic, tattooed young hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) who has been hired by mysterious sources to do a background check on Blomkvist. There is a link between the two characters and their exploits, as the people who hire Lisbeth for the background search also hire Blomkvist to come on and help them solve a 40 year old murder mystery in the six months or so before he is to go away to prison. This mysterious employer, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), turns out to be the head of a super rich company of some sort, and has been spending the last 40 years obsessing over the disappearance of his 16 year old niece Harriet (Ewa Fröling). While the characters of Blomkvist and Lisbeth seem destined to work together and have their stories intersect from the beginning, it takes at least a good third of the film’s runtime for it to happen.
The mystery solving portion of the film’s first act, centering around Blomkvist, sets up a vibe that’s like a cross between a game of Clue and some sort of ghost hunting expedition. The murder is so old, the trail so cold, that things take a bit of an interesting spin away from the typical whodunit. The suspects and victims haunt the film like specters rather than characters. It creates a moody ambiance that pulls you into the story almost immediately. Blomkvist, it turns out, was picked special for the case because the victim babysat him when he was a very young boy. There are a couple brief scenes, early on, where he flashes back to the smiling face of Harriet as she took care of him; they come off as a clumsy, manipulative attempt at making the mystery personal to the protagonist, but later prove to exist for a deeper purpose. That’s something you slowly begin to realize about this film, everything happens for a reason. The first act of the story establishes Blomkvist as, despite some initial stumbling with the case, a dedicated and trustworthy man. He hasn’t dug into the case files long before he begins to develop a personal attachment to its outcome; he is a man who has everyone’s best interests at heart.
The first part of Lisbeth’s story works to establish her as an angry, defensive, young woman who has clearly been a victim of some sort of past abuses. Her affairs are taken care of by a less than savory state representative due to violent and manic behavior in her past, and her interactions with him become the lense through which we begin to understand her as a character. This bit of the story includes some pretty graphic rape sequences whose intentions I couldn’t help but question. They are brutal, powerful, and realistic in the way that they are portrayed. The camera lingers, unflinching, long after we’ve got the jist of what’s happening and the full dramatic effect has already set in. It’s a huge break from the dreamlike, fictional tone of the rest of the film, and I couldn’t help but question if they were really necessary or if they were exploitative. But, like I said earlier, everything you see in this movie ends up being there for a reason. Establishing Lisbeth’s experience with sexual and physical abuse at the hands of men, and her resourcefulness and resolve in the face of such abuse, becomes essential to the payoff of the story later on. Throughout these tragic dealings it becomes clear that Lisbeth still has a pipeline into Blomkvist’s laptop, and when she catches wind of the mystery that he’s working on and decodes a clue to the case that he has missed, she sends him an email that throws their fate’s together.
A lot of what worked in this film for me was in the small touches, the crafting of the picture. It’s generally well acted, and it’s well shot, but it goes beyond that to put more effort into it’s production than most modern film’s do. There’s a small scene where Blomkvist has to track down some honeymoon pictures taken by a woman 40 years ago. We need the information contained in her photo album for the momentum of the narrative to keep moving forward, that’s the only reason she appears in the film at all. Despite this, the screenwriters go to the trouble of marinating every line of dialogue she delivers in character and personality. A lesser film would have stuck to more generic, expositional dialogue, but The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t content with that. Nothing here is lazy or easy. Even when something shows up for only a second, you can be guaranteed that it’s going to be crafted to the best of the filmmaker’s abilities, and that it’s going to be significant to the film as a whole. Overall, the pacing of the film works to make it a success as well, despite its lengthy runtime. The first act establishes our two main characters and lasts just long enough to tell us what we need to know about them without getting boring. The second act thrusts them together and digs deeper into the mystery at the heart of the film. Just when it seemed to be getting dragged out a bit too much, shots are fired in the woods. Just when the tension in the film was beginning to wane a slight bit, things become a matter of life and death. Now, an investigation that seemed like it might have been going nowhere is clearly pushing somebody’s buttons. Structurally, everything is done completely by the book, and it helps the pacing out immensely. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is classic mystery storytelling, just with a slightly more intellectual slant and a greater emphasis on character. Everything is there, including the red herring, but even that tired go-to is pulled off so well that it feels refreshing. Modern films are too intent on trying to shock and awe us with their unbelievable twists that they become gimmicky and predictable. This film leads us down a path that seems too obvious to be true, but it doesn’t go too far in trying to convince us that there is nothing else to offer; it doesn’t burn all it’s calories trying to set up a shocking turn, and it subsequently succeeds in keeping us guessing.
Not everything worked, however, and I did have a few minor complaints. Early on in Lisbeth and Blomkvist’s partnership there is a strange interaction as they start out on a road trip. Blomkvist mentions that he hasn’t driven in many years, and Lisbeth rolls her eyes as he has problem putting the car into gear with herky-jerky results. They then go on to argue over what to play on the radio. It felt like a cheap little series of easy gags in a film that had played everything with a gravely serious straight face up to that point. Of course, as I’ve already established, it later fit into the story by foreshadowing where their relationship was heading; but in a film that isn’t so obvious or clumsy anywhere else it felt like a jarring misstep. The acting is generally very strong from both the leads and the supporting cast, but there were a couple moments that I didn’t like in Rapace’s performance. In establishing Lisbeth as an abuse survivor, she takes on a very guarded and fidgety body language. Largely it worked, but there were a few moments where I felt there was a little overacting going on. One scene in particular that could have been kind of moving was ruined for me when she hurries out of a room with her head down and her arms rigid at her waist, resembling a sketch comedy character more than any person I’ve seen in real life. She handles the heavy lifting of the role well enough, and the character was pretty well realized, but there were a few moments where her shtick wore thin and my reaction was akin to, “alright, you have defense mechanisms! I get it already!” Lastly, despite my earlier claims that the pacing was largely skillful, I did have a small issue at the end. The dénouement goes on too long after the climax has already occurred and I caught myself looking at my watch once. I hesitate to mention it as a problem, as there was more to wrap up and be explained and I was genuinely interested in what the film had yet to say; but the mystery had been solved, the danger had passed, and I had already sat in my chair for well over two hours. Once people’s lives were no longer in danger I was ready to get up. Could something have been cut out to get the runtime down a bit and not make it so much of a problem? I’m not sure. I don’t have the answer there. Everything the film gives us is pretty essential, and it may have just been a necessary evil due to the adaptation process.
A neat little package. That’s how people generally describe stories like this. As I’ve mentioned, everything we were shown ended up being important in some way. Every moment that might have felt jarring or out of place ended up being important later on. Often I cite storytelling issues or plot holes in a film’s script as a huge negative, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has none. Is it absurd, then, that I found this film to be a little too well constructed? Every plot point, every character moment, fits into the story we are given; but they fit a little too well. They’re packed in a little too tight. When everything the characters do is in service to the plot and themes of the story, they begin to feel very unreal and inorganic. When every scene, every moment, is important to the story’s unfolding mystery, there is no room left for the protagonists to explore or just exist in real life situations. It makes the film feel overly crafted, too dogged in it’s structure; more a product and less an experience. It’s announced to us that we’re watching a story, not anything real, and it makes it harder to suspend disbelief and get lost in the filmmaking. I don’t know that this is a big enough issue to call a complaint. Can you fault a story for being too well told? Did this film make any claims at being realist? Probably it’s not going to end up being much of an issue for me looking back on this one, and it’s unlikely that it will be something that many other people get caught up on, but it was what I was thinking about most coming out of the theater. And that, right there, is largely why I view this film as a huge success despite having a few problems with it. I was thinking about it coming out of the theater.
