I first saw the original Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (or "Men who Hate Women," as it was entitled in Sweden) almost four years ago and although I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, it did leave some very strong impressions.
The first of these impressions was completely personal - a strong sense of relief that I had not taken my mother and uncle, who I love going to the movies with, to see it at the cinema. The film's portrayal of sexual violence was more than I would have wanted them to be exposed to - and it would have been beyond uncomfortable watching it with them.
I was certainly struck, as I think everyone who saw the film was, by Noomi Rapace's career-making performance as brilliant hacker and investigator Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is a talented but deeply wounded young woman who wears her heart on her skin in her punk hairstyle, piercings and (naturally) tattoos but who has so much that her emotions are deeply internalized, often causing consternation or outright offense to others.
Certain moments in the film are unforgettable, largely due to the plot rather than original Director Niels Arden Oplev's craft - the sexual violence Lisbeth suffers and then retaliates with being first and foremost. But for such a long film with subplots about industrial corruption, the dangers of pursuing truth in a superficially respectable society and the effects of profound abuse and reactions of those who suffer it, I'd really expected more depth. Instead, the film felt like a particularly long, particularly sensational episode of a TV procedural, with an incredible performance at its center.
Finally, I couldn't shake the feeling that Michael Nyqvist in the main role of journalist Mikael Blomkvist was almost an exact Swedish doppelganger for Daniel Craig...
Apparently David Fincher had a similar feeling about Mr Craig, for he does indeed star as Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who has just had a jury rule against him in a libel case brought by a powerful businessman Mikael had just profiled. Mikael is then approached by old industrialist Henrik Vanger (a perfectly cast Christopher Plummer), who wants Mikael to investigate the murder of his niece Harriet, who disappeared on the remote family-owned island of Hedeby where Harriet disappeared 40 years ago.
Under the pretense of writing old man Vanger's memoirs, Mikael begins to research and feel out the Vanger family but finds himself stymied by an unspoken code of secrecy and the length of time that the case has been 'cold.' Appealing for assistance with his research, Mikael is matched up with Lisbeth Salander (the titular 'girl') who brings with her exceptional talent, unsentimental determination and an intensely personal but emotionally internalized hatred of men who enjoy hurting women.
Craig does excellent work as Mikael - a flawed but sympathetic protagonist who is driven by professional ego and the need for personal (and financial) redemption, but also by a genuine determination to find the truth and personal loyalty to Henrik, a man who has helped Mikael in his darkest hour. Stellan Skarsgard is equally superb as Martin, Henrik's nephew, who is Mikael's greatest champion and ally in the family after Henrik falls into a coma midway through the investigation. Skarsgard brings a real sense of bonhomie to the role of Martin, while revealing an intensity in the climactic scenes of the film that feels true to the character he has created. That reveal in the original film felt too many too much like a self-conscious plot twist, almost arbitrary in its nature - Skarsgard and Fincher make it feel like all too convincing believable and uncomfortable.
But the film, of course, belongs to Rooney Mara as Lisbeth. Fincher was never in danger of being eclipsed by Niels Arden Oplev, Director of the original, but Mara's taking on the role of Lisbeth as unforgettably embodied by another actress seemed like a creative kamikaze mission - no matter how good she was, how could she possibly compare to Rapace? Excellently, as it turns out. With her bleached-out eyebrows, Mara looks even further out-there and more alien than Rapace, but her real accomplishment is to completely disappear into the role. And this is a role which requires extensive, unglamorous nudity and an ability both to suggest emotional scarring and hidden vulnerability under a deadened surface and to plunge unhesitatingly into real rage and grief when that surfaced is penetrated physically and emotionally.
Fincher is one of the greatest living craftsmen in film, a Director with a deep understanding of his medium, but he brings more than just craft (and the resources to better implement that craft) to his own take on the story. The most important of these creative decisions is simply that he leaves the story in its original time and setting. The temptation, and studio pressure, for any Hollywood adaptation of a foreign-language is original is to transplant the original story and characters into an American setting much more easily relatable to a domestic audience. Sometimes this works well ("The Departed" and "Let Me In" make nuanced, well-realized cultural transpositions from the Hong Kong and Swedish originals), but most of the time this studio-approved transplanting kills the patient.
By removing the cultural specifics that made the original so textured and compelling, the Americanized re-makes typically end creating forgettable and generic junk. Just like the trend in the '90's and early '00's to adapt Shakespeare for modern teen audiences, the studio's mistake is that what made the original interesting was its story (though Shakespeare freely stole most of his) when what really attracted the audience was the way the story was told. Watch Stephen Frears' "Dangerous Liaisons" and "Cruel Intentions" back-to-back for a perfect illustration of this principle in action. The latter film was directed by Roger Kumble, in case you were wondering, who also went on to direct "Cruel Intentions 2" (and yes, there is a reason why you've never heard of the guy).
I know very little about Swedish society, but I can say that certain crucial story points just wouldn't make sense in an American context: the weight of European libel laws and the absence of 1st amendment protections on journalists, Lisbeth's status as a 23-year-old 'ward of the state' and the vulnerability that creates for her, the specific dull respectability of the Swedish business establishment and the proximity of pure, lethal Nazism. These would need to either be erased, making the story that much blander, or forced into the script, stretching our suspension of disbelief and making it harder for us to believe in and identify with the character's motivations.
Fincher also does a much better job than Oplev of getting beneath the surface of the salacious story. This means that the story goes well beyond its main dramatic climax (as, to be fair, does Oplev's version), but it gives much more meaning to Mikael's motivations as an investigator and to the theme of the profound corruption of what we would now call 'the 1%,' a corruption that is buried beneath a thick veneer of respectability. The film's epigrammatic tag line, "What is hidden in the snow, comes forth in the thaw," is a Swedish proverb that is a rare example of the form that is both strikingly memorable and true to the themes and feel of the movie.
In Oplev's version, that dramatic climax, in which Mikael seems to have no means of escape from a truly horrifying fate, feels more intellectually than emotionally awful. Fincher's skill at creating all-too-believable psychopaths makes this scene genuinely chilling and physically menacing, the killer's motivation and elaborate set-up the terrifyingly plausible result of a history of abuse combined with an awareness of their unchecked inherited power.
Similarly, Fincher's staging and the performances of Mara and Yorick van Wageningen, as Lisbeth's predatory state 'guardian,' make the sensationally cruel abuse that Lisbeth suffers and then avenges herself for, seem more real and humanly motivated. In Oplev's original, these scenes felt effective but utterly manipulative, a skilfully played version of the most exploitative kind of rape-revenge story.
As I mentioned, both films go well beyond their main climax and resolution of the 'whodunnit' mystery, but again Fincher's version does more and more interestingly than Oplev's. I haven't read the novel, so I can't say (and don't really care too much) which is more faithful to Larsson's original, but Fincher's resolution of the tale of what happened to young Harriet Vanger is more narratively satisfying and a more meaningful take on the theme of what is hidden beneath the surface than Oplev's.
It would be an interesting exercise to watch both movies back-to-back for scene-by-scene detail, and I'm sure I would see strength's in Oplev's telling that I may not be remembering some four years on. I think Fincher's is the far stronger film, but I don't think it supplants the Swedish original, if only because of Rapace's dazzling performance. What is certainly true is that "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a perfect fit for Fincher's themes and craft and one that he obviously took seriously as his own work of art, rather than just as a higher-production-value remake by a Director-for-hire. If all English-language remakes were this good, I would look forward to them in the same way I look forward to seeing a new staging of "The Tempest," rather than seeing their only creative value as a reminder of quite how good the originals were.
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