The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that I was unfamiliar with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo story before I saw David Fincher’s new adaptation. I have not yet read Stieg Larsson’s book, nor have I seen the polarizing Swedish film that was the first to put the story onscreen. Fincher’s film was the first time I sat through the entirety of the story, and while that meant more suspense during key moments—something Fincher pulls off extraordinarily well, I might add—it also meant I was let down when the story just wound up being little more than a standard serial killer movie with a rather obvious ending. It’s a tad disappointing considering just how great Fincher is as a director—one of the best working right now—but even he can’t bring himself to elevate the material enough to justify its two-and-a-half-hour running time. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is still incredibly thrilling, and it’s still a pretty fascinating story, but when you get this kind of talent together you expect something a bit more than just a solid yarn.

The film spends much of its time following two characters: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and computer expert Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). The former just lost a libel case and is hired by the aging Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of his niece Harriet. Henrik believes a member of his family killed Harriet all those years ago, and it is Mikael’s job to find out just who did it. Lisbeth, meanwhile, is on the antisocial side and regularly spends her time trying to illegally investigate people and cases that “interest her.” After having some… let’s call it “man trouble”… she is recruited by Mikael to help with the investigation.

Fincher, as we’ve seen in countless other films, is at his best when he obsessively follows his obsessive characters as they do their obsessive things. There’s a reason Fincher does so many serial killer movies: his films are about people who become so fascinated by horrific cases that they nearly throw their lives away just to find the answer. It’s not about the killing itself; it’s about looking for the answers. At its best, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo recaptures the thrill of the hunt seen in the great Zodiac, as Blomkvist and Salander go from source to source attempting to find answers for the decades-old disappearance. There is no other director that makes mere investigation and procedure pop off the screen like Fincher, and here he once again works his magic and gets us just as obsessed with the case as his characters are. (Let’s remember this is the man that made college kids typing at a computer thrilling with last year’s The Social Network.) Perhaps it’s this directorial brilliance that makes the ultimate payoff feel just a bit lame; the audience has become so engrossed in the story that it’s disappointing when we realize that yeah, this is just a movie. Zodiac had the advantage of being based on real life, so it could justify its ambiguous ending. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is bound by both its source material and the rules of Hollywood moviemaking, and the story suffers for it.

It’s refreshing that this movie also doesn’t hold back from the ugliness; where other directors may cut away from some of the sexual and violent horrors shown here, Fincher normally stays with it long past the point of comfort. (Again, this may be the case with the Swedish film as well, but I plead ignorance.) This is most obvious in two early scenes involving Lisbeth and her new guardian Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), which are both memorably horrifying. It may be problematic that the film has its most brutal moments so early, but it’s hard to complain when Fincher directs them so well. These scenes mostly exist simply to show us just how messed up Lisbeth is, and they succeed, but like too much else in the movie it becomes inconsequential to the murder mystery at the center.

This desire by the film to stuff in as much of the book’s plot as possible ultimately harms more than it helps. So much of the running time is devoted to a compelling but ultimately very simple investigation, but a lot of baggage is added around it just to give the film a bit more substance. Instead, it just feels like fat that needs to be trimmed. Fincher and company would have been best-served to simply embrace the simplicity of the whole affair and not worry about all the other stuff in Larsson’s book. (Take, for instance, Panic Room, which is as simple as movies come but is also wonderfully exciting.) As well-made as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is, at the end of the day it’s a film that devotes almost 160 minutes to a story of no real consequence. And since it decided to take on all these subplots, the film’s third act seems to drag on long past the point when the audience really stopped caring. Frankly, much of the final 30 minutes could have wound up on the cutting room floor and we would have had a tighter movie as a result.

Still, it’s hard to deny what Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo does well. His ruthlessly efficient direction is hypnotic as always, and he is able to get some great performances out of his actors. It should also be said that while the film is quite long, not until the end does it really feel that way. Yet his real masterstroke between this film and The Social Network is the hiring of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to compose his musical scores. For one reason or another, the marriage of Fincher’s direction and Reznor/Ross’ music is just pure perfection, and I’m anxious to see what movies this team makes in the future. For now, everyone involved in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has every right to be proud of what they’ve done. It’s a compulsively watchable, suspenseful and gripping film that appears to be doggedly faithful to the very-popular source material. Transcendent it is not, and when compared with all the great serial killer films that Fincher has made, it can’t help but seem more than a bit trifling.

Grade: B

P.S. – Keep an eye out for the way that Purell is used in the movie. It’s not the most flattering of product placements.