The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Let's put the cards on the table: I have not read Steig Larsson's best-selling "Millennium Trilogy", and therefore cannot comment on whether or not Columbia Pictures' big-budget (American) adaptation of its first novel is a spot-on transfer of the shocking story, or if Rooney Mara has lived up to the punk-goth-genius of an anti-heroine he created. This review is about director David Fincher's craft and the dream cast he has assembled to make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo one of the most brutal and engrossing films of 2011.
Right from lustrous, sexy title sequence evoking torturous S&M imagery to the ultra-cool Karen O/Trent Reznor rendition of Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song", the Oscar-nominated filmmaker plunges his audience into a very specific experience. This is not to say that the story itself is notably inventive; Dragon Tattoo is more or less a standard serial killer thriller, wherein a pair of investigators attempts to solve a decades-old murder that has ties to other gruesome mysteries and a wealthy Swedish family. It's the sinister atmosphere and sinister tone he cultivates using color, music and lighting that makes this tale so unique and highly watchable in spite of the terrible events that occur throughout.
Perhaps most compelling, though, is its mixed bag of characters from different walks of life, including Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a recently disgraced financial journalist in need of an assignment, Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgard), a yuppie-ish corporate tycoon charged with running the family business started by his uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer) and Lisbeth Salander (Mara), the alpha-outsider and titular character of this eerie epic. All are emotionally scarred, and the actors charged with portraying them go the darkest corners of their own souls to make them their own. Mara in particular must be praised for her ghoulish and extreme embodiment of Salander, who suffers physical and emotional torment unlike anything we've seen in cinema this year. This, more than her scene-stealing presence in Fincher's The Social Network, is no doubt her star-making turn; expect to see her name on a marquee soon. Though she and Craig at times struggle with the Swedish diction (the latter's native British accent slips through more times than I can count), they more than make up for it with their physical personifications, facial expressions, etc. Yet it's Skarsgard who is most impressive as the younger Vanger (he's of Swedish descent), and delivers a stunning and chilling performance that will rival Mara's in defining this film in years to come.
Still, this is a Fincher film through and through, and I cannot think of source material better suited for the maker of Se7en and Zodiac than this disturbing chronicle. Visually, he's given the opportunity to create damp, decaying interiors familiar to fans of his work, but contrasts them with beautifully filmed exteriors, including some terrifying whiteout conditions that are sure to lower your body temperature. In terms of form, he and editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall effectively lay out dual character arcs (that of Salander and Blomkvist) that run parallel but connect in uncanny ways until their eventual convergence, resulting in a highly literary feel. Both Baxter and Wall won Oscars for cutting The Social Network, and I'm afraid that their penchant for quick transitions between shots has a decreasing effect on the terror; for a film that so closely treads the line between horror-thriller, I felt that letting certain shots play out a bit longer could've had more dreadful results.
Still, in no way I am saying that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn't come with its share of nail-biting suspense. Fincher takes tense situations to the next level using unconventional camera angles and Reznor's unnerving score, making many sequences in the movie hard to watch. It's a tiring but entertaining task; one that is a pleasure and pain to endure, but the auteur's masterful methods are quite magical even when being used to tell a story as menacing as this one.
There's nothing else playing at the multiplex this season that's quite like it, and should you choose to view it you'll carry its shocks with you for days after.
Hollywood.com rated this film 4 1/2 stars.