LITTLE ROCK — Given the current state of cinema, the term “thoughtful thriller” is in danger of becoming an oxymoron, as police procedurals and detective stories have by and large devolved into kinetic chase movies with bloody endings.
Hollywood always seeks to give the people what it thinks they want, and since most people use movies for what they term “escape” from their everydayness, the last thing a commercially aspirational filmmaker should do is challenge the billion-eyed beast. Subtitles are too much work for most moviegoers.
And so, a lot of people will disqualify themselves from seeing what may be the most deeply interesting movie released so far this year, Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. While it is hardly a perfect movie (at 152 minutes, it is too long) or even an especially subtle one (its critique of Swedish - and by extension, Western - society is neither novel nor particularly profound), it gets into your blood and colonizes yourdreams, like David Fincher’s Zodiac and Michael Hanke’s The White Ribbon.
Based on the first book in the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo distills the essence of the best-seller into a taut and darktale of murder, misogyny, buried lies, revenge and religious and political extremism. It even sideswipes former journalist Larsson’s disillusionment with what he saw as an enervated press (although itdispenses with much of the novel’s elaborate set-up with a few quick scenes).
The plot is pure Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett Los Angeles noir: Disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), to solve the 40-yearold mystery of his disappeared (and presumed murdered) niece Harriet. The old man has reason to suspect a member of his own family murdered the girl, and we soon come to understand why: The Vangers are a nasty lot, with the sort of ugly secrets that accrue to the untouchably rich and powerful.
Blomkvist finds Harriet’s diary, and some cryptic notations, but is at a dead-end until he gets some unlikely help from a young computer hacker, the goth-tough Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a damaged but resourceful researcher with a seemingly incorruptible personal sense of justice. Lisbeth correlates the notes to Bible verses and then to a string of horrific mutilation murders of women that occurred throughout Europe in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. They theorize that Harriet discovered the pattern and was the killer’s next victim.
But while the search for whatever became of Harriet Vanger is the movie’s dominant thread, the larger theme is of a kind of insidious mindset that admits pervasive violence against women. While we’re not given much insight into Lisbeth’s history, we do learn that she has spent time in a psychiatric ward and seems to have developed her cold, unforgiving and completely selfreliant character as a response to repeated exertions of male privilege. (The original Swedish title of Larsson’s book is Men Who Hate Women.)
And while all of the performances are strong, Rapace owns this movie and this character, to the point that casting anyone else as Lisbeth seems ridiculous. (She reprised the character in two sequels that may be released in the United States later this year, as well as in the Swedish TV series Millennium.)
Some of you may already be aware that an English-language remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is already in the works, with a tentativerelease date in 2012. Fincher is reported to be directing the film, with Brad Pitt in the Blomkvist role and Carey Mulligan (or possibly Ellen Page or Kristen Stewart) as the Lisbeth Salander analog. This seems to me to be a shame, despite the encouraging credentials of the principals. At best, it will be a wasteful duplication of effort, and it’s difficult to imagine a big budget Hollywood project could be as visceral, jarring and affecting as this remarkably thoughtful thriller.
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 05/14/2010