'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

By Bob Garver

Going into “The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too”, I felt con­fi­dent that the film was going to play a major role in this year’s Best Pic­ture Oscar race. It’s directed by David Fincher hot off “The Social Net­work” (and reunit­ing him with actress Rooney Mara and com­posers Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross among oth­ers), it opened at the height of awards sea­son, and it’s based on a best­selling crime thriller by Stieg Lars­son that I hadn’t read, but I knew was very pop­u­lar. Had I known the exact nature of the sub­ject mat­ter in the book and now the film, I never would have declared it an Oscar frontrunner.

Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist, a dis­graced inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist. He’s hired by mys­te­ri­ous mil­lion­aire Hen­rik Vanger (Christo­pher Plum­mer) to inves­ti­gate the decades-old “mur­der” of his niece at the hands of some­one in his own fam­ily. Blomkvist begins ques­tion­ing fam­ily mem­bers, who mainly tell sto­ries of how much they hate the other fam­ily mem­bers. The only like­able mem­ber is Henrik’s nephew Mar­tin (Stel­lan Skars­gard), so you know he has to be hid­ing some­thing. Blomkvist decides that he needs some­one to assist him and he chooses the per­son who was hired by Hen­rik to inves­ti­gate him to make sure he was right for the inves­ti­ga­tion. Her name is Lis­beth Salan­der (Mara) and she is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Lis­beth is sup­posed to be a ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, and to lis­ten to a descrip­tion she is indeed inter­est­ing. She’s tricked out her face and body with pierc­ings and acces­sories, she’s a bril­liant hacker and detec­tive who puts Blomkvist to shame, she turns psy­chot­i­cally vio­lent at a moment’s notice, and she tosses aside all sorts of social and sex­ual bound­aries. And yet for some rea­son the char­ac­ter is por­trayed as wooden, wooden, wooden. Her dia­logue is always either a regur­gi­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion or bored brag­ging about how effort­lessly she’s done some­thing com­plex and intri­cate. I know that the expla­na­tion is that she’s been through a lot in her life and she’s emo­tion­ally repressed, but she’s like a robot. A kinky robot that per­verts can’t wait for sci­en­tists to invent, but a robot nonetheless.

The film is heavy on vio­lent and sex­ual con­tent, and it’s often both at once. There is a rape scene, but it’s an R-rated rape scene as opposed to an NC-17. It’s the kind of scene where you’re very aware that the film is try­ing to hide just enough to avoid fur­ther cen­sor­ship. It has a dis­hon­est feel to it. It is fol­lowed by a much more grat­i­fy­ing revenge scene against the rapist. Else­where there is a detailed descrip­tion of a rape and mur­der spree. The crimes are described with such an array of dis­gust­ing details that Stieg Lars­son must have gone through quite the writ­ing exer­cise to come up with it all. The film’s cli­max is a tor­ture scene where the vil­lain goes on an increas­ingly crazy mono­logue about his shock­ing exploits. Daniel Craig may not be James Bond in this movie, but he still has to endure boast­ing from an over­con­fi­dent vil­lain. The scene goes on so long that it starts to seem silly.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too” is a grisly movie that feels unre­ward­ing because of its vile­ness. It works well on many artis­tic lev­els, it’s well shot and edited and there’s an awe­some title sequence on par with the best James Bond films. I wouldn’t even call it a bad movie, just one that I have no desire to revisit. I feel dirty hav­ing seen it, but I feel dirt­ier that mil­lions of peo­ple are going to see the movie and read the book with­out know­ing what they’re in for. Pre­pare to be disturbed.

Two and a Half Stars out of Five

“The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too” is rated R for bru­tal con­tent includ­ing rape and tor­ture, strong sex­u­al­ity, graphic nudity, and lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 158 minutes.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.