Tuesday, February 2, 2010

A few thoughts on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

9:40 AM / Cinema / 1 Comment

Note: a big thank you to Nick for setting me up with English subtitles, which are not included on the Norwegian BD version I watched. The film will receive a UK theatrical release in March, and an English-friendly BD will likely not be too far behind it.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most obvious choice for a big screen adaptation, for the simple reason that it's hardly the most cinematic of stories. There are only two or three genuine action scenes, and for the most part the story is about a guy working his way through page after page of evidence relating to a non-incident that took place forty years ago. This did, it must be said, result in a very engaging mystery novel, albeit one with some significant problems. Books and films are different media, though, and the success of a story in one doesn't necessarily translate into a success in the other. If I were in charge of adapting Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I'd be inclined to suggest that it would be most at home on the small screen as a miniseries.

Indeed, that's precisely what would have ended up happening to the two follow-ups to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - had it not been for the unprecedented international success of the novels. Thrown into production and shot for television on a small budget, they were hastily upgraded for the big screen, leaving The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the odd one out: a lengthy and slickly produced affair that, while suffering from and in certain cases amplifying the same problems as its source material, has a certain classiness that elevates a routine murder-mystery thriller into something more than the sum of its parts.

The plot focuses on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, Blomkvist has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago. Along the say, he teams up with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a wild child with a deeply disturbing past, who has spent most of her life rebelling against the various institutions into whose care she has been placed and is a living, breathing illustration of the phrase "damaged goods". Together, the unlikely pair set out to find out what really happened to Harriet and which of the numerous insalubrious members of the Vanger clan was responsible.

Larsson's novel, an imposing 550-page doorstop, has been pared down quite admirably to a less daunting 152 minutes by screenwriters Eric Kress and Jens Fischer, who do a decent job of excising the various mundane observations in which Larsson was apt to indulge and compressing or combining various events to make the story more succinct. This is particularly true of Blomkvist's early investigations into each and every member of the Vanger family, where several generations of history are reduced in the film to a brief montage of photographs charting various key events of the past century. Likewise, Kress and Fischer make the wise decision to bring Blomkvist and Salander together earlier in the narrative, rightly realising that the rather stodgy central mystery becomes more interesting when it is attacked concurrently by the two mismatched amateur detectives. A lot of it is still Blomkvist and Salander sitting in front of computer screens and occasionally venturing outside to talk to witnesses, but it gets from Point A to Point B far more quickly and with less irrelevant waffle than the novel. Where appropriate, significant events have also been shifted around to give them more narrative relevance. This is particularly true of a shocking revelation about Harriet, which was revealed in the novel when there were a good 200 pages still to go, but is here held back until the final 15 minutes, greatly lessening the sense of anticlimax. Likewise, Blomkvist's prison sentence, which in the novel occurred at an arbitrary point and served as little more than a distraction, has been shifted to a more dramatically appropriate point in the narrative and is now actually used to facilitate Blomkvist's character arc. That said, it's an extremely faithful adaptation indeed, maintaining virtually every plot development and generally only compressing and reordering events rather than altering them completely. (They even maintain the excessive product placement for Apple computers, although at least they refrain from listing the system specifications and hard drive capacity of each model they encounter.)

Niels Arden Oplev's direction is by no stretch of the imagination stylish, and he is hampered by the fact that he is saddled with a plot that provides few opportunities to do anything genuinely exciting with the camera, but the film has a polished, lavish appearance in spite of its staticity. He is also aided by an excellent performance by Noomi Rapace as Salander. Prior to seeing this film, I'd never heard of Rapace before, and I now find myself wondering why she isn't better known because she embodies the character so perfectly that I can't imagine anyone else playing her. True, she looks like an adult woman, whereas the Salander of the novel is repeatedly mistaken for an adolescent, but that facet is not exactly vital to the plot or characterisation anyway. Michael Nyqvist is less impressive as Blomkvist, although I'm inclined to go easy on him as he doesn't exactly have the world's most dynamic character to work with: the Blomkvist of the film is as dry and unremarkable as his counterpart in the novel. At least, though, this out of shape, humourless, middle-aged journalist doesn't spend the film's duration bedding everything with a pulse and a vagina, as he does in the novel, which gives him considerably more credibility.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is ultimately hampered by what it is: a faithful adaptation of a novel about a guy who sits around and doesn't do very much except read and talk. It does a fine job of bringing Larsson's characters and world to life, but it fails to expand them beyond what they were on the page. Essentially, it's very well-made. When someone describes a film in that way, it's usually a sure fire sign that they appreciated the technical craftsmanship but didn't engage with it on any level. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has more going for it than that, but it feels remarkably small-screen in its scope. 7/10

BD impressions to follow...

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