SXSW 2010: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO review

jackie-chan
Contributor; Derby, England
SXSW 2010: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO review

[With pan-Nordic thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo screening at SXSW we now re-post our earlier review from the film's appearance in Leeds.]


Yes, it comes with baggage. How could it not? In one sense Swedish author Stieg Larsson assured himself a place in history when he died of a massive heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the Millennium trilogy to his publishers. He never lived to see the skyrocketing worldwide sales that followed, much less the three planned film adaptations.


While a film can and arguably should exist free of any literary inspiration, understanding something of Larsson's background as a crusading left-wing journalist and how this informed his fiction does help in appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first film in the trilogy. Girl would presumably have done Larsson proud but, like his novel, it crams a frustrating amount of information in seemingly without knowing when to stop and disappointingly, the disparity between its technical mastery and genre roots prove to its detriment rather too often.


The film stars two main leads; prickly, asocial savant Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a young counterculture hacker working for a security firm who put up with her eccentricities so as to make use of her superlative computer skills, and middleaged journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist), a crusading firebrand known for taking up lost causes, currently in worsening legal and financial straits since chasing too hard after a story.


Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, the scion of a leading financial dynasty, an old man desperate to crack the long-unsolved murder of his beloved great-niece. Salander ends up assigned to Blomkvist to investigate the background to the court case brought against him, but ends up partnering with the journalist in order to puzzle through the decades-old crime he's investigating.


The novel juggles multiple plot strands and significant themes, many of which do not pay off in full until the second or even third book. Larsson devoted much of his early life to investigating far-right political parties in his home country and the narrative fairly bristles with contempt for extremism and bigotry of every kind; political, administrative, personal, inaction as well as action.


It is still a police procedural at heart, however, complete with long montages of digging through records, poring over photos and otherwise raking over history long forgotten, rounded off with a sociopath unmasked and a gruesome climax. Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg's screenplay for the film tries to fit in as much as it possibly can, to the point the first twenty minutes are practically a blur, skipping between passages of exposition and barely pausing to breathe.


The cast cope well enough; Arcel, Heisterberg and director Niels Arden Oplev wisely focus on the two leads, both of whom are more than up to the challenge. Noomi Rapace in particular gamely attacks the physical and mental demands of a character the script leaves sorely hard done by, abuse piled on abuse - the extended rape scene she has to suffer through is hardly Irreversible (thankfully) but still makes for painful viewing.


Oplev's direction is brisk and methodical, and once past the opening rush settles down into a kind of steady rhythm that captures the book's slow-burning pace fairly well. The money is certainly up on screen; Jacob Groth's score is pure blockbuster atmospherics, and the cinematography is never less than polished.


The climax is handled notably better than the opening, too - readers of the novel may note a lot of backstory has been excised, but the salient points are still there. The script even manages to neatly foreshadow some plot developments that don't come to light until the second book. Overall it's compelling stuff, and admirably self-contained.


This raises a contentious point, however - it's arguable the film isn't really much more than this (the novel, too). While it doesn't reveal the direction in which Larsson took the second and third books, which features some very pulpy, genre elements, for all its preaching Girl is still ultimately 'just' another police procedural.


Precision engineered it may be - cramming in as much of the novel as possible - fantastically acted and professionally put together, but it ends up fairly cold and clinical as a result. There's nothing here to make the narrative really sing, no passion, little real levity and no point at which the viewer's jaw drops.


All the same, cold, clinical or otherwise the film is unquestionably a very strong genre production. It's not hard to see it keeping audiences entertained regardless, and all but the most obsessive fans of Larsson's work should be more than happy to sit through the whole two and a half hours. It may be something of a missed opportunity - though could it ever really have taken liberties with the source material? - but it still comes highly recommended.

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