An adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson’s first ‘Millennium’ series entry, originally entitled, with an obviousness that better befits the material, “Men Who Hate Women”, this Girl is chiefly a man’s story, that of Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyvquist). A crusading leftist journalist who works for the independent newspaper Millennium, Mikael is at the outset sentenced to a short but still galling prison term when he’s convicted of libel. He’s actually been set up by Hans-Eric Wernerström (Stefan Sauk), the plutocratic target of his journalism, fed falsified documents and testimonies, and he stews in humiliation and alienation after the conviction. Faced with several months of appeals before his sentence starts, and put on ice by the newspaper, Mikael takes up a job offer from Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Tauber), for whose family Mikael’s father once worked in the ‘60s. The Vangers are a vastly wealthy, powerfully corrupt clan, except for odd members like Henrik, who wants Mikael to investigate a murder mystery that partly invokes Mikael’s hazy memories of childhood: Henrik’s niece Harriet (Julia Sporre), who once used to baby-sit Mikael, disappeared one day in 1966, never to be seen again.
That long-ago vanishing proves, after much snaking in the story and dramatic focus, to be tied in with the anti-Semitic leanings of several of the elder Vangers, and to a more omnipresent variety of icy, opportunistic misogyny waiting, in Larsson’s viewpoint, for any chance to express itself, on many levels of society. Victim, punisher, and general counterpoint is Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), volatile and emotionally withdrawn yet, when provoked, rather formidable, even savage. Survivor of a long incarceration in an asylum after trying to murder her father, who had abused her mother to the point of complete physical and mental breakdown, Lisbeth has grown into a superlatively talented hacker with a line in bold Goth style, working as a researcher for an investigation bureau, hired by Henrik’s lawyer Dirch Frode (Ingvar Hirdwall) to check out Mikael’s character before he’s offered that fateful job. Lisbeth asserts her opinion that Mikael was set up, and, after her job’s finished, continues to hack into his laptop to keep tabs on his investigations, and finally ventures an opinion as to what one enigmatic clue, a list of names and numbers that Harriet left behind, sending an email to Mikael that brings him to the door of her seamy flat quickly enough. They quickly form a crackerjack sleuthing team that begins to ever-more-hurriedly unravel the forty-year mystery and a grotesque legacy of psycho-sexual perversion.
I might have more readily forgiven this film its by-rote Euro-thriller plot elements, dubious rape-revenge exploitation, and the overblown hype that’s smothered its modest virtues, but for its conspicuous over-length and utterly perfunctory storytelling rhythm. Director Niels Arden Oplev tosses a lot of showy expositional tricks at the screen, whilst generally opting for a realistic, staid shooting style, but never makes his film suggest much more than a telemovie writ large. The actual mystery unfolds at such a sluggish pace and invokes such familiar developments – when will a mysterious killer start taking pot shots at Mikael when he’s out taking a jog through the woods? Right when you expect! – that it’s rather hard to care by the end about listlessly staged reunions of long-lost family members and revelations of the killer’s identity. Whilst there’s a lot about this that’s interchangeable with many similar films, TV shows, and pulp books coming out of Europe’s genre fiction market these days, it’s the paranoid, generalised vision of a wasted, wearied idealist left waging war with laptops against the shiny façade of corporate/fascist/misogynist hegemony which nonetheless taps into a distinctive contemporary perspective, and that’s without getting into the titular girl herself. What’s both appealing and more than a little perplexing about this film is that eponymous heroine, whose out-and-proud freakishness and angry righteousness blends with an actually more interesting fibre of sexual and emotional individuality.
That she’s a middle-aged man’s sex-fantasy is hard to doubt even before she gets in the sack with Blomkvist, and yet in a sneaky way it’s Lisbeth’s errant wilfulness in this regard I found most affecting: having tasted thoroughly the worst the world can offer, Lisbeth’s turned on by virtue, and it’s clear she’s smitten by Mikael’s inner decency, which is to her, as the lady who turns all the world’s false fronts inside out with her computer, utterly perceptible. The film’s most galvanising, but also the least convincing and even, in their way, reprehensible scenes are completely separate to the main story thrust. Lisbeth, whose troubled background takes a long time to emerge, is in thrall to a state-appointed guardian after her incarceration as an adolescent, and the new guardian, Bjurman (Peter Andersson), proves to be a sadistic control freak who wields his power over Lisbeth’s finances and liberty to gain sexual favours, and, later, tie her up and violently sodomise her. He proves to have badly underestimated his victim, however, for she’ll later visit his apartment, zap him with a taser, strip and bind him, as a prelude to forcing him to watch the video she took of his rape of her, blackmailing him, and then tattooing a fittingly declarative sentence on his stomach as a perpetual Mark of Cain.
As rousing revenge fantasy, it’s easy to relish, and yet it barely stands up under examination: that a girl as clever as Lisbeth willingly puts herself in a situation that proves to be extremely dangerous, even if she is counting on sexual humiliation, and is then surprised when it turns out even worse than she expected, is illogical. It’s even more improbable considering that Lisbeth’s talents as a hacker, researcher, and, later, amateur private eye can’t find another way to nail this creep, rather than putting her own frail virtue on the line. Lisbeth’s gifts and warrior grit are therefore used in opportunistic portions, placed aside long enough to achieve a false level of brutal provocation, so that the role-reversal and Valkyrie fetishisation can be given real pep. Worse still, there’s something innately facile about Lisbeth’s expunging her rape so coolly and efficiently in this fashion: the notion that Lisbeth has an instant channel for trauma in violent revenge and blackmail threatens almost to normalise what the narrative’s supposed to sensitise us to. These acts have no further specific relationship to the rest of the movie, except in resonating with the proper mystery which likewise involves a sexually sadistic thug. Lisbeth’s bisexuality, which could have been, ought to have been an appropriate riposte to the gender bludgeoning, is instead a throwaway piece of window dressing. Rapace’s edgy, closed-off performance inhabits Lisbeth as well as might be hoped, and yet there’s a lack of an accessed core to Lisbeth, which Rapace’s hermetic persona helps keep under wraps, that ensures this potentially interesting collection of traits doesn’t resolve into a proper character: she’s never quite as steely, crazy, and angry as she needs to be.
Lisbeth is, in her refusal to be cowered or defeated, admirable in intent, but she’s also a hardcore, extremist answer to Mikael’s white-bread liberalism, and a nearly equal, opposite monster to the people she’s reacting to. Her past and present finally collide when she allows the murderer, trapped in his crashed vehicle, to burn to death rather than save him – just as she did with her father! O, cruel fate! I found The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo most engaging when it was at its least bombastic, when Mikael is transfixed by two enigmatic females in his life: Harriet, who in her becalmed blondeness in the so-‘60s portrait photo he keeps tacked to the wall seems the image of some kind of lost, annihilated purity, and the spiky (literally), equally incommunicative, antipathetic avenger who finishes up sharing his bed, and nothing else. There’s a kind of mournful wistfulness here, nostalgic and unsentimental all at once, and long after all the rest of the film is a hazy blur of unironic cliches, these textures remain the most clear, the most affecting. As for the mystery proper, the usual sexy bestseller elements – Nazis! Serial killers! Biblical quotes to be decoded! – flit by in spurious interrelationship, as do a raft of minor characters, including some of Mikael’s former flames. The film builds to some minatory high points. The killer’s identity is ridiculously easy to spot – he’s the friendliest man in the film – but Lisbeth’s saving of Mikael from the killer, whilst being a too-too obvious inversion of the usual situation, is played with an undercurrent of blackly comic ease. All it takes is for a few good whacks of a golf club to scare away this remorseless machine of slaughter. Perhaps that’s the real message, and appeal, of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Evil is all about us, but it’s not up to much.
