The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009) Review

The first film in the adaptation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy presents a monstrous undercurrent among Sweden's wealthy elite. Combining a revulsion for entitlement, fascism/Nazism, sexual violence, and financial empires, the screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg seethes with anger at the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed, the movie is so earnest in its anger, so resolute in its conviction that something is wrong in modern Sweden that it obscures what a ridiculous and formulaic thriller it really is.

But then, I have a soft spot for ridiculous thrillers, especially ones willing to go full-tilt crazy instead of merely making a half-baked attempt (partial tilt?) at crazy. The crazy in question involves the 45-year-old mystery of the disappearance of the wealthy daughter from the prominent Vagner family on their isolated island estate. Her favorite uncle Henrik is convinced that she was murdered and that the culprit has been taunting him for decades via pressed flowers in the mail. He seems to be the only one in his family not touched by Faulkerian levels of madness and is convinced someone in his dysfunctional brood did the poor girl in.

Enter disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), who's looking down the wrong end of a 3 month prison sentence for libel against a wealthy businessman. Holmes to his also-Holmes is the titular tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a black-clad bisexual punk hacker with a photographic memory and some mysterious, damaging personal trauma. Between the two of them there's enough material going on to generate another movie entirely. Perhaps part of the movie's charm is that it attempts to resolve their many crises alongside an expansive mystery - this ends up giving the movie 2 additional conclusions after the resolution of the main plot.

Is it a good movie? Well, it's beside the point if you, like me, are a sucker for locked-room mysteries of this type. Mikael and Lisbeth are two of odder choices for protagonists in a mystery in recent memory - I'm willing the screenplay slack if Lisbeth seems like a hodgepodge of issues because the actors' rapport with one another overcomes some of the slack, merely functional dialog between them.

If it sounds like I'm being easy on the movie it's because I am. There's a special kind of charm that handles the revelation of financial misconduct with gruesome crime scene photos, ratcheting up the soundtrack and drawing shock and outrage from the two leads. I can forgive the multiple endings to the movie because the screenplay has treated the characters fairly and seeks resolution for them - even if I feel that some of the outcomes are a bit silly after the fact.

I won't say you should turn off your brain when you see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because that would be stupid, condescending advice. What I will advise is that you be open to outrageous ridiculousness, and you'll find one of the more enjoyable thrillers of the year (so far).