There will, of course, be moments of narrative deja vu if you're a fan of the Swedish film that preceded David Fincher's expectedly stylish and dark The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
But this "Hollywood" take of the Stieg Larsson trilogy is anything but the travesty the pessimists have been expecting. It is not a remake of that film, but an adaptation of a novel that most did not read in Swedish.
This version speaks its own language, Fincher's language, a harsh, uncompromising, more explicit portrait of a world of unknowns, and things that might be better off not known (this is the man who did Se7en, after all). Evils are perpetrated in the dark, figuratively and literally, abetted by solid actors who are uniformly up to the challenge.
This goes all the way from the smallest roles (Christopher Plummer, as Henrik Vanger, the "governor" of a dysfunctional family of millionaires, who enters the movie with geniality that is skillfully chipped away) to the movie's real revelation, Rooney Mara.
That would be the young woman previously best known as Mark Zuckerberg's outraged girlfriend in The Social Network, unrecognizable here as Lisbeth Salander, the emotionally-damaged, off-the-grid computer hacker/investigator who, almost in spite of herself, opens up to a disgraced journalist.
Hers is an angrier, abrasive chain-smoking Goth, a force of nature when crossed (and a fury in the infamous subplot about the social-worker/rapist). Mara's recent awards notices are well-earned.
The movie opens with both Lisbeth and journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) both shaken to the core by setback -- Lisbeth by a disabling stroke suffered by her enabling appointed guardian, and Blomkvist by a hugely public libel decision against him by a billionaire who may have, indeed, set him up.
Lisbeth enters his life from two angles. She is hired by Vanger to perform a background check on Blomkvist before hiring him to solve the decades-old disappearance (and probable murder) of his favourite niece. Blomkvist, in turn, hires her when he realizes the extent of the generations-long weirdness (including Nazi connections) going on in this incestuous cluster of shoreline family mansions, whose walls might hide a lifetime serial killer.
Said killer is indeed reminiscent of the one in Se7en, wrapping the killings in trappings of Old Testament verse from Leviticus.
En route to the truth (and an implausible, but audience-pleasing side ending), there's violence and a shooting, but more often the more discomfiting hint of same around every corner.
As for the quibbles, Craig may seem kind of buff to represent my profession (and it takes a short while to erase Bond from the viewer's mind), but he does properly present Blomkvist as the more passive-aggressive of the investigative odd couple (their sexual relationship, harder to figure in the Swedish version, seems more a characteristic act of aggression mixed with tenderness, in line with Mara's impulse-driven approach to life).
This is some pretty raw stuff to gift-wrap under the Christmas tree this holiday movie season. But it is also a great story for awards season, when adults can finally see movies for adults.
By that standard, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a gift indeed. More Movie Reviews
