The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This movie contributed to my recent hiatus from reviewing. I saw it weeks ago, but I didn’t know what to say about it.

And I still don’t.

The story is now so well-known I hesitate to even encapsulate it, but here goes:

Swedish journalist and social crusader Mychael Blomqvist gets summoned by a rich old man on a snowy island, who tasks him to discover who on the island killed the old man’s niece Harriet some twenty years ago. The old man is convinced the killer is still alive, and he suspects it is a member of his own extended family.

Blomqvist accepts the assignment because his own career is in jeopardy after making some powerful enemies. Over the course of the investigation he surprises himself by making a powerful friend: goth punk computer hacker and sexual abuse victim Lisbeth Salander. Together they hunt down a killer and learn that they really, really like each other.

This story works. It worked as a novel – smashingly well – it worked as a Swedish movie, and it works as an American movie.

But of the three, it works least well as an American movie.

I think it’s because the tone is fundamentally un-American: intelligent (ha!), brooding, pessimistic, and consumed with the smothering weight of the past.

The American movie closest in tone to Dragon Tattoo is Silence of the Lambs, but the differences are instructive. Silence was all about remaking oneself, turning a tragic past into a heroic present, and learning you have more in common with the worst serial killer in history than with your boss or your peers – and learning that such a similarity speaks pretty well of you.

“Oh Clarice, people will say we’re in love…”

Dragon Tattoo is a good story, but it’s not really our story, and even if you throw our best writer – Steven Zaillian – our best director – David Fincher – and one of our best musicians – Trent Reznor – at the project, it’s STILL not our story.

This is all a little airy, though.

Maybe the problem is that Rooney Mara, while good in the iconic role of Lisbeth Salander, isn’t pitch-perfect the way Swedish actress Noomi Rapace was. It’s hard to follow a performance like that a scant few years later.

Maybe the problem also lies with Fincher’s decision to extend the drama many minutes too long after the climactic death of the dreadful killer. The discovery of lost Harriet should fall fast after the killer’s death; it shouldn’t be its own mini-plot. There’s no more danger in the story, and thus no suspense.

No project in Hollywood looked like more of a sure thing than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last year. Hottest property, brightest stars, studio backing… how could it go wrong? Yet it barely managed to cover its costs, and was shut out of every major Oscar category.

Sometimes a movie is too obvious, too straight a shot, too easy an accomplishment to be any good.

Art has to be hard.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 71/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100