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Directed by Niels
Arden Oplev
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The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo Those
of us who love Stieg Larsson’s trilogy that
begins with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” have been amazed by
the choices he’s made to populate the books: his hero is a
40-something-year-old journalist named Mikael Blomqvist, who has just been convicted of libelling a Swedish industrialist and will soon start a
six-month prison term. The
heroine is a 24-year-old woman named Lisbeth Salander, who has been raised as a ward of the state and
who’s suffered under the hands of a series of sadistic rapists who
became her state-mandated guardians. In
the months before he begins his sentence, Mikael is
hired by an elderly industrialist named Henrik Vanger to help solve the 40-year-old disappearance of his
niece during a local festival. Lisbeth, who’s been investigating Mikael for her own reasons, decides to help him in this
wild goose chase. Lisbeth, no doubt on an Asperger’s
spectrum – photographic memory, no human emotions that she can let out,
a computer hacker like none you’ve ever seen before – begins to
work with Mikael on the mystery. And yes, she has an enormous dragon
tattoo on her back. Henrik’s own family is
unappetizing: three of his brothers were Nazi sympathisers
during the war. His own daughter
died of breast cancer years before; but he is willing to pay, now 40 years
later, to find out whatever can be found about his niece. That’s the setup, and the film
plays out the slow accumulation of facts about the niece and what may have
happened that day. What’s
just as interesting as the accumulation of facts is the strange relationship
that begins with Mikael and Lisbeth
working on the mystery. She is
never off her guard, he is a man too nice by far to
take advantage of her, even assuming that he could. Director Niels
Arden Oplev makes sure that we in the audience
never learn more than they do. He
and his writers, Nikolaj Arcel
and Rasmus Heisterberg,
have removed a whole bunch of relationships that are in the book in order to
concentrate on solving the mystery, but unless you’d like the whole novel
transferred to the screen (and the film runs two-and-a-half hours, even in
its streamlined form – and I assure you that you will never notice the
time) there is plenty for you to enjoy.
Lisbeth, particularly, is a heroine unlike
any you’ve ever seen. She
is both a prisoner of her abusive childhood and an incredibly single-minded
woman who puts her own talents to work on the mystery. Together they are unlike any other
team you can even think of. Stieg Larsson, who was an investigative reporter and had
never written fiction before, left us three novels before he died
unexpectedly at age 44 – and there is some speculation that it was an
unnatural death, caused by people he was investigating at the time. We may never know, but the books he
left us are treasures enough for anyone.
“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is just the beginning;
there’s much, much more to come. |