David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo arrives with quite a lot of pressure on its heavily inked shoulders. Expectation is coming from three fronts: the fans of Stieg Larsson’s novel (of which there are 30 million people and counting), fans of David Fincher (of which there are many) and fans of Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish version (the camp I fall most confidently into of the three). But with the firepower of Fincher, James Bond and the girl from the opening of The Social Network (2010), the omens looked promising.
The film follows Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist who after publicly failing to take down a crooked businessman, decides to shy away from the spotlight leaving his paper and instead doing a job for retired CEO Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). Vanger wants Mikael to find the killer of his niece Harriet who disappeared from the family island forty years ago. After fighting some demons of her own, rebellious but brilliant computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) joins Mikael in a hellish investigation of the twisted history of the Vanger family.
From the Bond style oil soaked opening credits that shake to the sound of ‘Immigrant Song’ to the truly inspired use of Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ that haunts one of the film’s more dangerous moments, Fincher brings a style to the story the Swedish version just doesn’t have. And that’s not necessarily a criticism. Oplev’s film (originally made for TV) avoids drawing attention to itself and the result is gritty and raw. Fincher’s is still a tough watch but is flasher, tenser, ultimately more entertaining and as a result, sits much more comfortably on the big screen.
A key element of the film is family. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ wrote Philip Larkin, and if he had lived long enough to see this, he may have been tempted to add a few more family members into the mix. Fincher deftly manipulates our view of the Vanger Island into family member associations and by doing so, creates a piece of land that could rival Scorcese’s Shutter Island in the menacing stakes. By clearly showing us who lives in what part of the island, as it becomes clear that the family largely hate each other, Craig’s Blomkvist finds himself stuck on an island battered by waves of hate and anger. A floating family prison that’s haunted by the ghosts the past.
The performances too are very impressive. Rooney Mara more than matches Noomi Rapace’s acclaimed portrayal of the disturbed girl of the title and at one stage wears a t-shirt that beautiful sums her character up. She becomes increasingly more sexy, dangerous and wounded as the film progresses, a perfect match for Craig’s competent Blomkvist who, if nothing else, has introduced me to a fantastic new way of wearing glasses.
The ending suffers, like the Swedish version, as time ticks by (the film clocks in at 158 minutes) and another, somewhat confusing case has to be wrapped up but that’s more a fault of the book that of Fincher’s direction. By the time the credits roll, you are left with a very impressive, very adult movie that slightly trumps the Swedish version as a result of its cinematic qualities.
Fincher’s film looks great on the surface but you can’t really quite grasp whether there’s a heart beating beneath it until the very last frame. It’s an emotional final moment that surprisingly confirms there is indeed a heart beating beneath Fincher’s polished creation, and it’s ice cold.
