“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the newest feature by award-winning director David Fincher, is the “Saving Private Ryan” of rape revenge films. It contains sequences of gut-wrenching sexual violence that seek to give viewers a first hand education in the horrors of human depravity - in much the same way that the first fifteen minutes of Spielberg’s famous WWII epic sought to teach the terror of war. Yet, to label this film and author Stieg Larsson’s source material so crudely is to do them both a grave injustice. “Dragon Tattoo” is clearly meant to be an emotional journey into a deep chasm of familial shame, and a glimpse at the blossoming of an angry, anti-social young woman into a human being who is capable of love and trust.
Too bad, then, that this new adaptation never really connects as much as it needs to in order to be truly successful. I can’t speak for the original (and supposedly superior) Swedish version, but Fincher's “Dragon Tattoo,” while high on shock value, commits the cardinal sin of being deficient in emotional impact. Its stellar, crisp production aesthetic (courtesy of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth) perfectly echoes the story’s snowy Swedish landscape, but the film itself proves too clinical as a result to provoke any real response from its audience.
This is not to say that it’s a total loss. Rooney Mara’s performance as the now-infamous hacker Lisbeth Salander is endlessly fascinating, and as true to Larsson’s source characterization as I could imagine. Daniel Craig struck others as the wrong actor to play the barely-reputable journalist Mikael Blomkvist, but seemed to me from the outset to be the obvious choice. He and Fincher seem to have wisely agreed to tone down his James Bond charm, and screenwriter Steve Zaillian (of “Black Hawk Down” fame) makes the correct choice of excising some of Blomkvist’s more extraneous (and eyebrow-raising) physical affairs. This has the distinct benefit of making him a more believable and grounded character, even if some of his color is lost in translation. I also hear that we have Craig to thank for the incorporation of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” into a critical torture scene – one of the film’s scattered moments of pure genius.
The three-hour long “Dragon Tattoo’s” primary flaw, then, is in its pacing, which feels maddeningly uneven and frequently rushed. The set-up of the central mystery (which takes up the first hundred pages of the novel) is here reduced to a scant fifteen minutes, and feels especially clipped. Characterization is scrapped for rote expository speechifying. Key dialogue exchanges occupying pages of manuscript are often reduced to three or four lines, and cut off before they have the chance to really become interesting. As a result, we never really get the chance to know or become close with Blomkvist, and although such distancing might help us to realize Salander’s solitude and strangeness, her much-awaited moments of fiery retaliation are disappointingly brief. In fact, there is little emotional payoff at any of the major plot twists, and most every revelation feels less satisfying and more like a missed opportunity. That, of course, is when we can actually understand how those revelations were reached; the truncated nature of Zaillian’s script left me wondering if I could have followed the story at all had I not read the novel beforehand.
Gone, too, is the sterling sound editing that made Fincher’s Oscar-nominated (and equally labyrinthine) “Social Network” comprehensible. The audio mix here, especially at the outset, is frustratingly mushy, and all the characters resurrect the briefly dormant dramatic mandate that lines must be delivered in a hushed mumble. It’s totally annoying, and since all of the players sport regularly unintelligible Swedish accents, it represents a serious technical misstep.
Finally, there’s the issue of the film’s graphic content. I sat down in the theater expecting the worst, and “Dragon Tattoo” was only a fraction more tasteful than I thought it would be. It could have been worse, but I would be irresponsible to gloss over this aspect of the experience, especially considering my earlier treatise on discernment. There are several scenes that portray the sexual exploitation and rape of Salander at the hands of her state-appointed guardian, and they are unremittingly intense. The film leaves considerably less to the imagination than Larsson’s novel, but it accurately portrays the inherent evil of rape that too many women experience in their lives. The act itself is not glorified, and certainly does not arouse. It is an act of brutal psychological warfare, and portrayed as such. The film would function were they merely implied, but at a much less effective pitch.
The same cannot be said of later sequences depicting consensual intercourse between our two leads. These were merely implied by the novel, and their inclusion serves no major purpose in establishing or furthering plot or theme.
In the end, this “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a toss-up. It is a functional adaptation of an excellent book, but perhaps only seasoned fans and readers will fully appreciate it. Those uninitiated should not expect a masterpiece. They should, however, expect an exploration of sexual violence that is as dubious in its execution as the characters that inhabit its plot structure. There is some good, and some evil – but not much light either way. Here’s hoping you’re not too afraid of the dark.
