The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som Hatar Kvinnor) (4/10)

January 12th, 2012

A disgraced journalist and his trusty sidekick, a computer hacker (no irony there, then) investigate rum goings-on at a foreboding Swedish mansion. The manor’s patriarch, Henrik, has been receiving flowers every year since 1966 from his niece Harriet. Thing is, she’s missing, presumed dead. The police gave up decades ago, but that’s the police for you. If you really want to know something, hire a journalist.

First of all, please accept my apologies for coming late to the party. I didn’t see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it was released in 2009, and only watched it recently because of the David Fincher remake, a remake I haven’t seen and probably never will. That’s not the point of this piece of writing, which isn’t really a review either. Instead, it’s more of a general observation on a film that came out, got a few decent reviews, and was hastily rehashed for cinemagoers who don’t like to read their movies, the poor loves.

Blomqvist, the journalist, played by Michael Nyqvist, is the journalist. Rugged and ragged, his reputation is that of dogged determination, a perfect quality for the job at hand. Even he, though, hits a brick wall in the mystery of the disappearing niece. Sure, he makes a few guesses, all of which turn out to be spot-on, and gets some miraculous luck with a photograph of a woman taking a photograph, but such serendipity can only take him so far.

Enter the hacker Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace, the titular female, and the only thing unusual about this holiday novel page-turner). She hacked Blomqvist’s laptop yonks ago and still pops in from time to time on the off chance he’s on to some good stuff. Helpfully, she emails him when he can’t piece together the religious angle hinted at in the movie’s early stages (‘yes, three of my relatives were Nazis, you know’, sniffs Henrik ominously) and the union is bonded, quite literally, soon after.

Lisbeth has her own problems but, grotesque as they are, I’ll leave you to discover them. Me, I found them to be particularly unsavoury and could just as easily have been told as shown, but maybe that’s just me. The studded, multi-pierced hacker is shown sleeping with a woman, although that aspect isn’t delved into at all but, like most lesbians in movies, she still finds time to shag our hero too. Lesbians, they’re so indecisive. Still, as the recent Leveson Enquiry has shown, a journalist and a hacker have no scruples and no code of ethics to work to. One way or the other, they’ll get the job done.

Despite its title, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, and is quite clearly written by a man (Stieg Larsson). Lisbeth might as well be a man and be done with any mock-feminism the film’s heading suggests. However, she isn’t a man, and that’s good news for us sex-starved men. If she were a man she wouldn’t need to get her kit off, for example, or pout, lips half-parted, in every scene.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m just as bad as anyone when it comes to holiday novels. When I’m lying on the beach, going a golden shade of crimson, there’s nothing I like more than reading mindless drivel that contains the exact same ingredients I’ve come to expect over the years. It’s familiarity, it’s a sense of comfort, and it eases the brain. After all, isn’t that what holidays are for? In this sense, I enjoyed all two-and-a-half hours of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but that doesn’t make it a good film. I’d guess that not even Sex and the City’s most ardent admirers would claim that the movie versions of their favourite foursome were great cinema. It just gives those poor unfortunate souls the opportunity to turn their brains off for a bit and just wallow.

It’s easy saying this now, of course, but the Swedish original version even feels like a Fincher movie. Big, ominous and airy, it’s Fincher in Zodiac mood, Fincher in The Game period; basically, it’s Fincher doing what Fincher could do in his sleep. Again, I haven’t seen the remake, but I’m not sure how he could change the American version to make it more his puppy than it already was. I recently mentioned that Norway’s Headhunters was about as Hollywood as Scandinavia could be, but I was wrong. This movie is even closer to Tinseltown.

Amazingly, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won the 2011 BAFTA for Best Foreign Language movie, beating Biutiful, I Am Love, Of Gods & Men and The Secret In Their Eyes. Perhaps the BAFTA voters were all sipping pina coladas in 35 degree heat on a foreign beach when they cast their vote. I can think of no other explanation.