By Jonathan Fisher, April 6th, 2010
The give-away of a great thriller is its ability to first fool you into thinking that you're smarter than the story, and then to make you realise that you have no idea where it's going. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish thriller that is perhaps longer than we're used to at two and a half hours, is also a whole lot better than we're used to. On one level, it's a whodunit, a detective story populated by two characters that don't act as if they are mere cogs in a cookie-cutter plot. On another level it's a confronting experience about the appalling consequences of misogyny.
The film opens with the tail-end of the trial of Mikael Blomkvist, an journalist being sued for libel against a prominent Swedish tycoon. He loses the case and is sentenced to three months in prison, to be served at some point in the next three months. After his sentencing, an elderly billionaire who lives on a forboding island contacts Blomkvist, asking him to further investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet thirty years ago, who disappeared mysteriously on a day that the island was cut off from the mainland (shades of Shutter Island). The billionaire postulates that because the island was cut off on the day Harriet disappeared, her murderer must have been a member of his large, greedy and repulsive family.
Concurrently, a young hacker named Lisbeth Salander (the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo, played by Noomi Rapace) is spying on Blomkvist. Lisbeth is one of the most distinct and original characters I've come across in a long time. Intense, hard-edged, but wounded, Noomi Rapace gives a stellar performance. Due to a psychologically turbulent past, Lisbeth has to report to a custodial guardian, a despicable man who forces her to perform degrading sexual acts in order for her to gain access to her own money.
Eventually Blomkvist becomes aware of Lisbeth's spying, and the two wind up investigating Harriet's disappearance. The two become a formidable detective team. The murder mystery is pretty straight-forward in a narrative sense, taking cues from any number of Agatha Christie stories. The ingenious thing about the movie is that even though it feels conventional, there comes a point where one realises that we have absolutely no idea where the story is going -- and the pay-off is more satisfying and intriguing than we could have imagined. Throughout its 150-minute duration, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is spellbinding -- slickly produced, well performed and elegantly paced. It's one of the best films of this still young year.
The story of the trilogy of books is as amazing as JK Rowling's journey to her Harry Potter success. Stieg Larsson, a modest journalist, wrote the trilogy in his spare time, more for his personal enjoyment than anything else. He died in 2004 at the age of 44 of a massive heart attack, when the manuscripts were complete, but unpublished. His wife carried the torch, believing that the books were good enough to find an audience. How right she was -- six years later, the trilogy has sold around 30 million copies around the world, and has been turned into a successful film trilogy.
It's probably a good thing that the original translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Swedish name ("Män som hatar kvinnor" -- "Men who Hate Women") was cast aside for the film's title. While that inflammatory name hints at the cajones that this adaptation of Stieg Larsson's revelatory book has, it would probably put people off seeing it. This is a film with justified aggressive, angry feminist undertones. Another title for it could have been "Men who Hate Women. And Women who Hate Men... for Good Bloody Reason".
Posts
2 comments: