Almost as soon as finishing the book, I watched the Swedish film adaptation on Netflix and I couldn't believe how disappointed I was. What I had just seen was not The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was hardly a shadow of the source material. Sure, the overall story was there, but that's it. Gone were myriad subplots connecting the whole story. Gone were the well-developed characters. It had been reduced to a simple crime serial. Had I just seen the movie with no context for the actual story, but that isn't the case. As a movie it was pretty good. As an adaptation, well, it was completely awful.
Which brings us to now. The American adaptation started to receive some buzz when it was announced that David Fincher (The Social Network) would be directing the project and has piqued my interest at every junction. First, I learned that Steven Zaillan (Schindler's List, Moneyball) would be adapting Stieg Larsson's work. Then, David Fincher brought Daniel Craig into the mix as disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist. The final announcement was that Fincher had chosen Rooney Mara to play social outcast Lisbeth Salander.
Up until this point Mara's most notable screen performances were as Nancy in the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake and in a minor role as Erica Albright in Fincher's The Social Network. This was both interesting and daunting to me at the same time. I was interested because it's always a treat to see a small actress make her big break. I felt daunted because Noomi Rapace was about the only thing I praised when she played Salander in the Swedish adaptation. I felt Mara was up to the task of the character, but Rapace had set the bar very high.
With all that said, let's get down to brass tax. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as told through Fincher's eyes, is a cold, dark and haunted tale. It follows journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently disgraced due to a libelous story and hacker Lisbeth Salander, a ward of the state who has been deemed socially incompetent.
Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to find out which member of his family murdered his niece Harriet. Meanwhile, Salander's state appointed guardian suffers a stroke, leaving her in the care of a new guardian, the wholly unsavory Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageninjen). Blomkvist and Salander don't actually meet face-to-face until well into the movie when Blomkvist realizes he'll need help in solving the mystery.Fincher's film tackles the source material much better than its Swedish counterpart. For starters, it actually develops the relationship between Blomkvist and his co-editor at Millenium Magazine, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), which adds another layer of depth to the overall story. Second, it approaches the film's conclusion much better. There are three different resolutions in the book and while I won't divulge any of them here, it is safe to say that Fincher and Zaillan succeed at all three. The Swedish adaptation only succeeded at one.
All of this isn't to say that the film isn't without fault. Despite its grandiosity and haunted beauty, the film feels underdeveloped as a whole. I can't rightly put my finger on it, but it felt like something was missing. Fincher does such a good job at creating a feeling of hopelessness with the cinematography and locations, and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is so artfully macabre, but it feels like they overlooked something. That something, perhaps, is silence.
The film is set mainly in the northern Swedish town of Hedestat and the snow, night sky, and overall mood make it seem like such a lonely place, but there always seems to be some noise going on. I wouldn't ask Reznor and Ross to cut their score down, but accentuating the silence may have been the key this film needed to achieve its true effect.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - 4/5
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