by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo, a 2011
production of a story that began as a Swedish-set and Swedish-language mystery
novel by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish author and radical socialist who put his life
at risk fighting the Swedish Right and edited a socialist magazine called Expo. When he died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 50
three completed mystery novels were discovered among his effects, all of them dealing
with a magazine called Millennium and a private-eye character called Lisbeth Salander, a young punk woman
in her early 20’s who had been judged criminally insane at age 12 for trying to
burn her father to death (“I got 80 percent of him,” she says in the movie,
though he’s actually shown as a live character towards the end) and who is
allowed to live on the outside and work, but who isn’t allowed access to her
own money without the approval of her guardian. When she isn’t hanging out at
Lesbian bars and picking up girlfriends de jour she’s employed by a private detective agency on a
clandestine basis because the work she does for them — essentially hacking into
their targets’ computer systems and extracting all their personal information. The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the
first of the three novels to be published, a year after Larsson’s death in 2005
— the original Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women but the English-language version was given a name
with more “mysteryicity” and more of an emphasis on the character of Lisbeth,
who’s one of the most original and idiosyncratic “sleuth” characters ever
invented. The original book was filmed in Sweden in 2009 and the two subsequent
entries in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, were also filmed in Sweden, all with an actress
named Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth.
When Sony and its movie subsidiaries, Columbia
and MGM, bought the rights to do an English-language remake, the studio was
heavily lobbied to allow Rapace to repeat the role in the English version (sort
of like Ingrid Bergman introducing herself to U.S. audiences in the
English-language Intermezzo, playing a part she’d previously portrayed in a Swedish film), but
Rapace herself begged off the assignment because she’d already made three films
as Lisbeth and she was understandably tired of playing her. The actress they
finally got — after considering a lot of hot young “names” including Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page, Kristen
Stewart, Natalie Portman, Mia Wasikowska, Keira
Knightley, Anne Hathaway, Olivia Thirlby, Emily
Browning, Eva Green, Scarlett Johansson, Sophie
Lowe, Sarah Snook, Léa Seydoux, Emma
Watson, Evan Rachel Wood, and Katie
Jarvis — was Rooney Mara, who’d mostly done TV work (including
an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit called “Fat” from 2006 that I shall want to dig
out of the boxed sets and watch again) and had been in such underwhelming
assignments as the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friends (With Benefits). It probably helped that she had worked with the
director of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher, before — she was in The Social
Network as Erica Albright, the
girl who dumps Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and gets him in such a pissy
mood against all women that he starts the
chain of events that leads him to create Facebook — but she’s absolutely right
for the role (though I’m somewhat handicapped in assessing that because I’ve
never read Larsson’s book nor seen the Swedish film): short, compact,
androgynous, athletic, energetic and with just the right sort of chip on her
shoulder to be believable in this very interesting character (and she even
pronounces the “t” in “often”!).
According to an imdb.com trivia entry, she
even had herself pierced for real in all the various places (including multiple
ear, eyebrow, and nipple piercings) the character has had done instead of just
wearing simulated jewelry — though, as Charles pointed out, she almost
certainly stopped short of actually having herself tattooed and the titular
dragon that extends from her left shoulder halfway down her back is likely
makeup. (Another imdb.com contributor says Noomi Rapace also had herself
genuinely pierced; piercings close up again if you don’t keep them open with
the jewelry, while tattoos are almost always irreversible.) The film contains
two central characters: Lisbeth and journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig,
who according to imdb.com put on weight for this role so he wouldn’t be seen as
James Bond with a different name), who co-owns an independent magazine called Millennium with his co-editor and girlfriend Erika Berger
(Robin Wright) — a laconic entry in Lisbeth’s dossier on him says that “he
practices cunnilingus, not often enough in my opinion,” and that both he and
Erika were married to other people when they started dating and his marriage
broke up as a result but hers didn’t (which suggests interesting and kinky
possibilities for a spin-off right there!). When the film begins they’ve just
lost a major libel suit filed by international banker Hans-Eric Wennerström
(Ulf Friberg) and Mikael has been socked with a judgment of 600,000 kroner
(Charles informed me that a kroner is worth about 60 cents, so this would be
$360,000, not much by international-banker standards but enough to wipe out
Mikael’s life savings), and now that the judgment has broken him (at least
financially) he’s amenable to being hired by a mysterious tycoon, Henrik Vanger
(Christopher Plummer), to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a teenage
girl relative of his who was last seen in the audience at a parade in 1966.
For
the first half of this long (158-minute) movie the plotline involving Mikael
(who, being Swedish, at least has a legitimate excuse for spelling his name
that way) intercuts with that of Lisbeth, who when she’s not busy hacking into
other people’s computers for her bosses with cheery disregard for the law is
having to deal with the slimy new guardian she’s been assigned, Nils Bjurman
(Yorick von Wageningen — so “Yorick” is a real Scandinavian name! I always
thought Shakespeare made it up!), who first asks her a lot of intrusive and
seemingly irrelevant questions about her sexuality, like how many lovers she’s
had, how many have been male, whether she’s been treated for an STD and whether
she’s been tested for HIV. We soon learn that he has a personal reason for wanting this information; he’s decided
that he’s going to extract sexual services from her every time she wants money
for any reason at all. First he makes her blow him in his office so she can get
a new state-of-the-art laptop; then he makes her come to his home, overpowers
her, puts handcuffs on her, ties her to his bed and anally rapes her. Then she
gets her revenge, overpowering him and leaving him in a room where she ties him up, strips him, sticks a fearsome-looking metal
butt plug up his ass (without lube, of course!) and shows him a secret video of
him raping her which she shot with a hidden camera in her backpack, with one of
the buttons on the front serving to conceal the lens. She says that unless she
gets a formal declaration from him and regular monthly reports stating she’s sane
and able to handle her own money, she’ll publicize his crime by posting the
video on the Internet — and for good measure she tattoos his chest with the
word “Rapist” and says the video of him raping her will automatically post
itself if her computer catches him visiting a Web site offering tattoo removal.
(According to the Wikipedia page on Stieg Larsson, he was inspired to create
the Lisbeth character in the first place over his guilt that, as a young man,
he had witnessed a girl named Lisbeth being gang-raped and had done nothing to
stop it.)
Lisbeth and Mikael don’t actually meet until almost exactly the
halfway point of this film — it’s explained that the private detective agency
he hires was the one the banker used against him, and it was Lisbeth who hacked
into Mikael’s computer and got the derogatory information that helped the
banker win the case — but once they do, the film develops chilling force as it
spirals through a number of relatively conventional mystery conventions given a
decidedly unconventional “spin,” including a private island where most of the
Vanger family lives; a bizarre assortment of relatives, including serial
killers and neo-Nazis, that make the dysfunctional families of Law and Order look like Norman Rockwell could have painted them
by comparison (so many of the Vanger men molest their young female relatives
that undergoing child sexual abuse seems almost a rite of passage in this
family!); the sudden reappearance of a character we’d been led to believe was
dead; and a father-and-son team of serial killers of women: father killed women
and used his murders to dramatize various condemnations in the Book of
Leviticus — this took director Fincher back to familiar territory: his
thoroughly repulsive film Se7en, about a serial killer who made his murders dramatizations of the Seven
Deadly Sins, though at least in this one the murders happened so long before
the main part of the story that they were kept mostly invisible to us and we
were spared the sickening details that made Se7en, at least to me, not only a bad movie but
positively repulsive to watch (and I must confess to heaving a sigh of relief
that Larsson and screenwriter Steven Zaillian spared us having him kill a Gay
man to dramatize Leviticus’s most famous prohibition: 20:13: “If a man also lie
with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,, both of them have committed an
abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them” [King James translation, emphasis in
original] — which makes me wonder how any self-respecting Queer person can believe in Judaism, Christianity or
Islam, but I digress); after daddy died his son went into the family business
but in a considerably more realistic and less showy way, building himself a
torture dungeon in his basement and disposing of the bodies afterwards rather
than leaving them out to be found. (In one of the climactic scenes this
character captures Mikael, ties him up — this film has more bondage scenes than
any I can think of other than an S/M porn movie — and puts a plastic bag over
his head to suffocate him, which fortunately for him takes quite a bit longer
than I’d always assumed it did and gives time for Lisbeth to come on the scene
and rescue him — and both Charles and I noted the irony of James Bond, or at
least the most recent actor to play him, needing someone else to save him from the super-villain’s baroque
trap!)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a movie that highlights the absurdity of the motion picture ratings
system and the “R” rating in particular — a film can get an “R” if it has just
two dirty words (this was the problem with the currently playing documentary Bully) or if it has as much brutality, violence and
kinky sex as this one — and it’s also a quite exciting thriller, a bit too long
(especially with one false climax after another to stretch the ending past the
two-hour running time that would have been right for this material) but a quite
credible evocation of the film noir spirit (cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth manages the feat of getting the
chiaroscuro look of black-and-white noir in a color film) and with an original music score
by Trent Reznor (as an in-joke, one of the characters wears a T-shirt
advertising Reznor’s “band,” Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross that’s used
sparingly and with the reticence more common in modern movies than in the
classic age, when even in otherwise great movies like the 1941 Maltese
Falcon you want to tell the
composer to shut up already. The chemistry between Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara
is excellent — I particularly liked the sex scenes between them, kicked off by
a peremptory order from her that might have come from an Ayn Rand woman or the
Whitney Houston character in The Bodyguard, especially the second one, in which he wants to get back to business
and she keeps it going until she has her orgasm, whether or not he ever does (a nice reversal of the way
heterosexuality all too often gets portrayed in the movies — or happens in real
life, for that matter!) — but the true sense of life in this film comes from
her (come to think of it, there’s a bit of Conan Doyle in their relationship,
with he as Watson and she as Holmes): the character is so unforgettable that
one can readily see why Larsson’s books became a worldwide cult phenomenon and
have made it to the big screen when quite a lot of less edgy detective fiction
around these days hasn’t.
Incidentally, I read a New Yorker profile on the Larsson phenomenon which centered
mainly around an interview with his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who because
Larsson never either married her nor registered them as a domestic partnership
(according to Wikipedia, that was because under Swedish law they would have had
to make their addresses public record, and he didn’t want to do that because he
didn’t want their Right-wing enemies to know where they lived) got screwed out
of any royalties from his books. Instead the money went to his father and
brother — and Gabrielsson said that she owned his laptop, which contained
three-fourths of a fourth Lisbeth Salander novel as well as drafts and notes
for up to six additional ones. She offered to release the book and complete it
herself if she could get a share of the estate, but Larsson’s blood relatives
refused: an intrigue that could itself make for an interesting mystery
thriller! The film downplays Larsson’s socialist politics — not surprisingly
for an American corporate product — but given that the story’s villains include
an international banker and two neo-Nazis, there are certainly hints of where
this story’s creator was coming from. It’s the sort of movie that makes you
want to read the book — not only because books are usually intellectually
richer but also because some of the plot ambiguities might be clarified in
print, much the way Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep became a best-seller again after the 1946 film was
revived during the height of the Bogart cult in the early 1970’s and a lot of
people (including yours truly) bought the damned thing simply to see if it made
sense of all the loose ends left in the movie — which it did to some extent, though not entirely!
