Charismatic Mara soars in 'Dragon Tattoo'
Reviewer's Rating ★★★
Following the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of Rings series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, likely the first installment of a new round of hit movies based on a vastly popular literary source, arrives in theaters this week.
As with previous widely anticipated fiction-to-film adaptations, director David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s choices will be widely debated by fans of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Nonetheless, their stylishly crafted American interpretation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has much to recommend it, especially for non-Millennium Trilogy followers who won’t get hung up on the story’s unavoidable abridgement. For a mainstream release, it’s also unusually graphic and brutal.
First and foremost the film’s success rides upon the till now obscure Rooney Mara and her performance as Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the tattoos and laptop computer.
Salander is the series’ brilliant, 23-year-old cyberspace detective, a damaged, nonsocial Goth-girl with many tattoos and piercings, ever-evolving hairstyles and kick-butt defensive skills.
Mara, previously seen with Michael Cera in the little-seen Youth in Revolt and as Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend in the Fincher-directed The Social Network, claims the Salander character for herself. She does so with such authority that it’s difficult to see anyone else as the Millennium Trilogy’s alluring, underdog heroine.
Running 158 minutes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo centers upon the mystery that an elderly Swedish industrialist has obsessed about for 40 years. Christopher Plummer, in another of his dependably colorful character roles, easily slips into the role of Henrik Vanger, whose niece, Harriet, vanished in 1966.
Vanger believes she was murdered by someone in the Vanger family.
The Vangers, despite their enormous wealth, are a twisted lot. Mostly estranged from one another, they include alcoholics and at least one unapologetic Nazi. Given such lineage, Henrik Vanger’s assumption about his niece’s fate surely isn’t beyond credible.
The industrialist hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist from Stockholm, to come to the Vanger family’s private, snowy island off the Swedish coast and investigate Harriet’s disappearance. He promises Blomkvist that he’ll come to know the most despicable group of people he will ever meet. “My family,” the old man adds with some amusement.
British actor Daniel Craig (Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) handily, earnestly fills Blomkvist’s shoes but, of course, this is Mara’s movie.
When Blomkvist and Lisbeth, soon to be partners in the Harriet Vanger investigation, are introduced they’re both in dark places.
Lisbeth, judged mentally incompetent by the state, does not control the income she makes through her virtuoso cyber skills. She’s under the hypocritical heel of a sadistic social services bureaucrat who, as far as the state is concerned, can decide whether she retains limited freedom or is confined to a mental institution.
Blomkvist, the co-owner of an investigative magazine, Millennium, has just been convicted of libel. After losing his life savings to the libel judgment, he accepts Henrik Vanger’s profitable assignment to probe Harriet’s disappearance.
The movie’s set-up pays off, largely because it lets Salander loose to do her sleuthing and enact some well-deserved revenge, to smashing effect. There will be blood. Hardened and wizened by years of bad breaks, she is an avenging angel in black.
Charismatically played by Mara in Fincher’s coolly executed, moody depiction of Larsson’s book, the tattooed girl really does kick a hornet’s nest.