News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Sunday, July 18, 2010

A few thoughts on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

8:01 PM / Cinema / No Comments

I don't envy those faced with adapting the third and final instalment in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE NORTNETS' NEST. The novel is extremely discursive, the dramatic tension is often lacking, and the heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), spends a good three-quarters of the narrative confined to a hospital bed under police guard. It works to an extent on the page but has the potential to be death on the screen. It's therefore something of a relief to be able to report that writers Jonas Frykberg and Ulf Ryberg have succeeded in sidestepping many of the issues that plagued Larsson's novel and have delivered a screenplay that is both more streamlined and considerably more tense than the source material.

As with the novel, the film picks up from the moment where its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, left off, and teases out the final chapters in the Lisbeth Salander story that began when, at the age of twelve, she was committed to a psychiatric facility under false pretences in order to protect a valuable asset - her father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko - from exposure. Although no longer suspected of the three murders that framed the previous film, Salander now faces a raft of new charges, including the attempted murder of Zalachenko. Initially, the primary concern is with the bullet lodged in her skull, but once it is clear that her recovery is not in any doubt, it falls to unlikely accomplice Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist) to uncover the suppressed truth behind the Zalachenko affair, dodge the bullets aimed his way by an increasingly desperate rogue offshoot of the security service, and provide the marginalised Salander with the chance to finally attain the justice that has been denied to her for her entire life.

Like the previous film, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is low budget and obviously made with television in mind. The conspiracy narrative, however, serves the pared-down visual style better than the somewhat more action-oriented nature of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and gives less of a sense that the movie is trying to be something that it's not. Like the book, the film is largely static, with a small handful of action scenes punctuating a lot of very dialogue-driven material. However, by abridging, eliminating and re-ordering the narrative, the writers succeed in giving the film the sense of uncertainty that the novel sorely lacked. As written by Larsson, the outcome was in little doubt, and the stakes seemed strangely low thanks to the fact that all the cards were effectively laid on the table at the beginning, with all the evidence Blomkvist and co. needed to annihilate their opponents readily available long before Salander's trial got underway. For fear of giving too much away I won't go into precisely what changes are made, but suffice it to say that if the book had played out in a manner closer to the film - or if I'd watched the film before reading the book - I wouldn't have gone through the whole thing with a feeling that I knew exactly how everything was going to turn out.

With Rapace confined to a hospital bed for the bulk of the running time, Nyquist ends up having to carry the film to a far greater extent than the previous instalments, and he does rise to the challenge, although he remains a rather wooden and expressionless lead. In a way, it's hard not to feel sorry for him, because despite his character doing most of the legwork in all three films, it's Rapace who has received the bulk of the attention - particularly in the English-speaking world, where all three instalments bear the prefix "The Girl..." (in the original Swedish, only the second part uses this naming convention). Blomkvist's associates, Erika Berger (Lena Endre) and Christer Malm (Jacob Ericksson), also play far more significant roles than in the previous two films, with the latter benefiting from an exploration of his and co-worker Malin Erikson (Sofia Ledarp)'s reservations about the course of action pursued by Blomkvist (in the novel, everyone is more or less accepting and in admiration of everything Blomkvist does, a manifestation of the character's role as an idealised representation of the author himself). Speaking of Berger, the film's writers have wisely dropped the novel's seemingly irrelevant subplot involving her giving up her position at Millennium to work for a rival publication, integrating its strongest thematic element (the attempts to blackmail and terrorise her) into the main narrative. As a whole, the film feels far more cohesive than the book.

It's all about Rapace, though, and she proves that it's possible to be incredibly compelling even when lying in a hospital bed and staring into space. Her greatest asset is undoubtedly her ability to convey pages' worth of material with a single subtle change to her facial expression, and she repeatedly puts this skill to good use. Salander doesn't say a lot and this, coupled with her largely stationary role, means that she runs the risk of being submerged by the events around her, but because Rapace is so good, and because Salander remains such an iconic character, this doesn't happen. That said, even if Rapace wasn't such a good actor, it would still be pretty hard to forget anyone who turns up to her own murder trial in full goth regalia (would all those sharp spikes even be allowed in a courtroom?).

I came away from THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST thinking it the weakest of the three novels. Conversely, I felt that THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was the strongest on the page and the least impressive on the screen. Thanks to its slick production values and clarity of purpose, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remains, by a considerable margin, the best of the three adaptations, but director Daniel Alfredson has done a decent job of translating books two and three to the screen in spite of the limited resources at his disposal. I have a feeling that David Fincher, if he chooses to adapt the entire trilogy for the US market, will wipe the floor with Alfredson's take on the second and third instalments - at least in terms of visual panache - but at the same time there's something quirky, honest and altogether European about all three films that I doubt even a filmmaker of Fincher's calibre will be able to match. And, at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me state, for the record, that no-one can replace Noomi Rapace. 7.5/10

No Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.