Let Sleeping Dragons Lie
Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson died November 9th of 2004 in Stockholm at the age of 50. He suffered a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office because the elevator was not working. Larsson left behind manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels. He had written them for his own pleasure in his free time and had made no attempt to get them published until shortly before his death. The first was published in Sweden in 2005 as Män som hatar kvinnor, which literally means “Men who hate women.” It was titled for the English market as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson never lived to see how successful his manuscripts would become.
The wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger hires a skilled yet disgraced reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). His assignment is two-fold. Blomkvist is to research the sudden disappearance and suspected death of Henrik’s niece, Harriet Vanger; a death that occurred 40 years ago. The second step is that he must disguise his work from the Vanger family. Henrik states that his rotten family tree is a collection of Nazis, anti-semites, sexual deviants and unstable recluses. All of them could have been responsible for this long since cold crime. But as the Swedish proverb says, “What is hidden in snow, comes forth in the thaw.” Blomkvist hires a pierced, tattooed and anti-social computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) to assist him in organizing the many skeletons in the Vanger family’s closet. The deeper they dig for the truth, however, the greater the risk of being buried alive by members of the family, who will go to any length to keep their secrets tightly sealed.
In the recently made American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher channels Sweden’s arctic climate into the atmosphere of his film. In a stroke of luck, Sweden’s coldest winter in 20 years provided him with a setting that was just as unforgiving and austere as the films characters. Based on the first novel of the literary blockbuster Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson the movie is certainly not for those who are faint of heart. Fincher provides a perverse cocktail of lurid passions that simultaneously repulse and hypnotize an audience. Mara was the picture of total role commitment. She aptly portrays Lizbeth Salander as someone who is damaged and vulnerable but at the same time explosively vengeful. Many have compared Mara’s performance to Noomi Rapace’s in the lesser known 2009 Swedish version. Was it a cash grab to remake this film that was already done well only two years ago? Realistically, no. How else do you tap a market of people who are willing to read a 700 page novel but refuse to read subtitles? Costarring in this mystery were Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgård, and Christopher Plummer.
While Larsson’s story portrays evil and the criminal mindset in a more honest way than we are used to seeing, it isn’t exactly escapism. Almost three hours of grisly crime may actually be more of a downer than anything. Containing two highly graphic scenes of rape, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is decidedly “the feel bad film of this Christmas season.”
It’s certainly worth seeing if you missed the original. If you saw it, however, there’s no way of unseeing it, and nothing in the new one to top it. Craig and Mara are great here though and Fincher brings so much more to this film like I was expecting too. Good review.