When Gothic Swedes Attack!

Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (2009)

Director:  Niels Arden Oplev
Writers: Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, Stieg Larsson (novel)
Studios: Yellow Bird, Music Box Films, Alliance Films, Lumiere, GAGA
152 min.

  

It’s And Then There Were None with incest!  Actually, the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the 2005 posthumous Stieg Larsson novel it’s based upon) is Män som hatar kvinnor which translates literally to Men Who Hate Women.  And they do indeed, as Swedish actress Noomi Rapace’s BAFTA-nominated performance as the brutalized and morose yet unbreakable professional hacker Lisbeth Salander is Larsson’s embodiment of his male guilt—he admits to having witnessed the gang rape of a girl at age fifteen and doing nothing to stop it, an instance which haunted him for the rest of his life.  This is why, in the film’s most cathartic scene, for Lisbeth and the audience collectively, our heroine exacts violent revenge on her sadistic parole officer Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson).  Having beaten and raped her on multiple occasions, she Tases him, ties him up, anally violates him with one of his own sex toys, and tattoos ’RAPIST’ (amongst other things) across his quivering thorax.  (If Tarantino had directed this, that scene would have been scored to Ennio Morricone music, Lisbeth’s weapon of choice would have been a samurai sword, and Michael Madsen would’ve been involved.  Actually, I’d like to see this film!)  The scene is a graphic feminist role-reversal of the phallic penetration and subsequent naming that never tries to be anything more than a moment of desperation for Lisbeth; it's something she had to do.       

And therein lies Dragon Tattoo’s best dramtic choice: we aren’t shown Lisbeth’s brutal rape and her rebutal as some kind of Lifetime Original Movie-esque construct to suggest everything is solved by this very masculine form of power assertion or, at the other end of the spectrum, to stand up and cheer when she eviscerates her rapist (as I’ll admit to doing).  Director Oplev doesn’t include rape scenes for their value as an instance of the disturbingly in vogue torture-porn that lately masequerades as ”gritty”—a word that’s been hijacked by people who like bad movies.  Instead, Lisbeth’s experiences serve as a framing device for the film’s real plot: Lisbeth has been hired by exposé journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to help solve the mysterious disappearance of the neice of Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) off the family’s island compund forty years ago—a disappearance that, obviously, involves lots of other instances of "men who hate women."  Lisbeth utilizes her penchant for dolling out deserved retribution (oh, did I forgot to mention, she also immolated her father after he abused her mother as a child!) to support her axiom that everyone is responsible for their own actions regardless of their upbringing, a belief her partner-in-crime-and-in-bed Blomkvist doesn’t initially share.  But at its heart, Dragon Tattoo is an old-fashioned mystery/thriller with brilliant pacing and is refreshingly devoid of the obnoxious, eleventh hour Shyamalanian twist that every thriller of the past decade feels the need to utilize—you know, that twist that renders the entire first two hours of the movie worthless by revealing that the detective is actually the killer or the victim is actually a ghost who imagines the detective in his head while sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot.

 

 

Still riding high from The Social Network, David Fincher’s English version of Dragon Tattoo for Columbia, with Nyqvist doppelganger Daniel Craig and unknown Rooney Mara in the lead roles, hits theaters this Christmas.  While Hollywood’s remakes of foreign films are famously inferior, I’m optimistic: Fincher handled Biblically-based ritual serial killings a decade and a half ago with Se7en and astrologically-based ritual serial killings more recently with 2007’s Zodiac—both films triumphs of the genre.  As for the amazing Noomi Rapace, her Hollywoodization doesn’t seem so promising: she’s stuck in the next ”add a girl” role in this December’s Sherlock Holmes 2.  Lisbeth would not approve. A-

Second opinions:
Entertainment Weekly: "The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness."
Roger Ebert: "This is a movie about characters who have more important things to do than be characters in an action thriller."
Variety: "[A]s a whodunit rather than a noir, Girl ranks as a more-than-workmanlike Nordic crimer."