Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara. Written by Steven Zaillian from the novel by Stieg Larsson. Directed by David Fincher. 18A. 157 min. Opens Dec. 20.
Besides its sometimes messy plotting and queasy tendency to use sexually violent imagery to both outrage and titillate, Stieg Larsson’s book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo poses another big challenge to any filmmaker. That’s the abundance of scenes in which our heroes stare at laptop screens while pouring over Google search results—a sight that’s rarely dramatically compelling.
Yet it is in one of these scenes when the sophistication of David Fincher’s new Dragon Tattoo film is most clearly revealed. It happens relatively late in the action, by which time Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig)—a Swedish journalist enlisted to solve a decades-old mystery involving a wealthy family on a remote island—has developed a tentative intimacy with Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the tormented young hacker who’s the true centre of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Lisbeth is sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in front of her screen when Mikael slips a hand up the back of her T-shirt. After his excitement over the latest revelation causes him to move his hand, she asks him to return it. Brief and seemingly inconsequential, this moment does more to humanize Larsson’s heroine than nearly anything in the original novel or the Swedish film version, both of which tended to present Lisbeth as a vengeance demon with an eyebrow ring.
Indeed, it’s worth asking whether the source material deserves the care it gets here. From the gorgeous cinematography to the ingenious editing techniques to the cunning soundtrack, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is vivid proof of the director’s technical mastery. What’s more surprising is the poignance that he and screenwriter Steven Zaillian lend to the chilly proceedings. While the contents remain plenty ugly—especially Lisbeth’s rape—and occasionally ludicrous, Fincher’s film is distinguished by its grace and intelligence, two qualities that few could’ve expected to find in this snowy landscape of Scandinavian sleaze.
