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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
| Released |
26 December 2011 |
| Director |
David Fincher |
Starring
|
Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Steven Berkoff, Robin Wright, Yorick van Wageningen, Joely Richardson |
| Writer(s) |
Steven Zaillian |
Producer(s)
|
Ceán Chaffin, Scott Rudin, Søren Stærmose, Ole Søndberg |
Origin
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United States, Sweden, United Kingdom, Germany |
| Running Time |
158 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama, thriller |
| Rating |
18 |
|
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The Dragon’s Tale.
Adapting a book for the cinema is always a tricky task. When that book is a bestseller, the task becomes even trickier as fans of the book take an emotional interest in how it is adapted. When the book is an international literary sensation like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the task becomes even more difficult. And when that book has been successfully adapted into a film already, albeit in another language, the pressure is ramped up to maximum.
By the time Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy broke into the international market three years ago, the Swedish film version was already in production. So when Columbia Pictures announced an English language version in early 2010, they knew they’d have a lot to compete against. So they got in the fearsome producer Scott Rudin, the Joel Silver of quality films. Rudin brought in a line-up of top-grade talent. Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York) was recruited to write the script. Hot off The Social Network, David Fincher was brought in to direct and he brought with him his regular music collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The big speculation was who would play Lisbeth Salander, the “girl” herself. Big name actresses like Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Carey Mulligan were linked with the role. Eventually Fincher plumped for the relatively unknown American actress Rooney Mara, who had a small but crucial role as the girlfriend who dumps Jesse Eisenberg in the opening scene of The Social Network. The current James Bond, Daniel Craig, was brought in to play the other main character, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist.
The story opens with Blomkvist having lost a libel case against a dodgy industrial tycoon. This puts him and his magazine Millennium, under huge financial pressure. He runs the magazine with his co-editor (and sometime lover) Erika Berger (Robin Wright). A lawyer, Dirch Frode (Steven Berkoff), then approaches Blomkvist with an intriguing offer. Frode has already done a background check on Blomkvist with the aid of Salander, who is a brilliant researcher at a security firm through her expertise at computer hacking. He asks him to meet with Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), an elderly industrial magnate. His company was once a great power in Sweden but its fortunes have flagged under the leadership of his nephew Martin (Stellan Skarsgård).
Henrik asks Blomkvist to investigate his family about the disappearance and murder of his niece Harriet over forty years earlier. Blomkvist protests that he’ll probably find nothing new, but he agrees to the job anyway to take a break from Millennium. Meanwhile Salander is having problems of her own with her new state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen). Salander and Blomkvist eventually team up and they discover the family is a nest of vipers and there are several dark secrets going back decades.
All in all, Fincher has done a pretty decent job. The opening credits sequence is exhilarating; a nightmarish mix of images of ink and dragons accompanied by an industrial version of Led Zeppelin’s 'Immigrant Song', by Reznor and Ross featuring Karen O of the band Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. It sets the tone for the darkness of the material involved that includes a particularly graphic rape scene. When an American version of the book was announced, it was feared that they would seek to tone down the sexual violence against women, which was the central theme of Larsson’s book. To their credit, they’ve stayed pretty faithful to the book, despite incurring an ‘R’ rating in the U.S.
With Noomi Rapace having done such a good job at playing Salander as an almost feral punk in the Swedish films, Mara takes a different tack. Though the punk look is the same, Mara takes a quieter, most emotionally absent approach and it pays off with the best performance in the film. Craig does his best, but the Blomkvist character is so dull by comparison, there’s not a lot he can do to make it memorable. There’s also classy support from the veterans Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård and Steven Berkoff.
Be warned, this is a long film, well over two and half hours. For those who’ve not read the book or seen the Swedish version, it should prove captivating enough to maintain their interest. For everyone else, it’s a bit of a slog at times, but that’s mainly because we know the story already, which isn’t the filmmakers’ fault.
Overall though this is a classy piece of filmmaking that is a lot better than was expected.
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Jim O’Connor |
