RECENT WATCHES: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, known for his coverage of right-wing extremism and his socialist politics, died unexpectedly at the age of fifty in 2004. His friends and family say he barely slept and subsisted largely on coffee and fast food, which might explain his passing so young. Larsson left behind a trilogy of books, the first three parts of an intended decalogy, which were publish posthumously. Known as the Millennium Trilogy, the series became a best-seller in Sweden. When published in English, it became a world-wide success. Film adaptations would quickly follow, all three being released in 2009. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” would debut on American theater screens shortly afterwards, which is when I first became hooked on Larsson's characters and story.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, head writer at the controversial Millennium magazine, has been convicted in a libel suit after writing an apparently fallacious expose on a millionaire named  Wennerström. Blomkvist insists on his innocence but prepares to face his sentence anyway. At this point, the head of the famous industrialist Vanger family hires Mikael. In 1966, Henrik Vanger's beloved niece disappeared, while the island was blocked off. Henrik is convinced she was murdered and that her killer is still alive. Blomkvist soon teams up with Lisbeth Salander, the mysterious and anti-social – but utterly brilliant – hacker that has been trailing him. Together, the two uncover a serial killer who has been active for decades. 

Stieg Larsson was not an especially great novelist but he knew how to put together a page-turner. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” both the novel and the movie, present an irresistible mystery. Vanger repeatedly points out that nobody could've gotten in or off the island on that day. He's had forty years to endlessly rehash the evidence. We are presented with a worthy selection of scumbag suspects, all of them greedy industrialists or literal Nazis. It's a compelling scenario to start with. When Mikael does manage to uncover new evidence, via an old photograph, and has to track down a corresponding photograph from the same day, you are drawn in even more. Watching Mikael and Lisbeth dig through the clues and come out with a solution is a lot of fun. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” in its literary form, was almost a textbook example of an airport read. The movie maintains that quality.

I mean, assuming you can stomach all the rape. The English translation of Larsson's original book title is “Men Who Hate Women.” Lisbeth is attacked by men in a subway, which is merely a predecessor to a more extreme abuse: Her legal guardian sexually assaults her in his office before brutally raping her on a later visit. This is depicted in graphic detail, the focus on her anguished face. Later, as Mikael and Lisbeth discover a serial killer is at work around the Vangers, they uncover photos of numerous dead girls. Their mutilated, usually nude corpses are shown on-screen. The film is obviously trying to make some sort of point about misogyny, about how men in power abuse women as easily as they breathe. Lisbeth's rapist and the sexist, anti-semantic serial killer both get what's coming to them. Yet whether you feel this justifies parading tortured, raped women around to spruce up a typical murder-mystery is really a matter of personal taste.  

What “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has that really makes its special is a captivating protagonist. I'm not talking about Mikael Blomkvist. Michael Nyqvist plays Blomkvist as a bit of a sad sack. He's a good investigator, digging through piles of photos and seeking out decades-old witnesses. (This is an improvement over the book, where he's also irresistible to woman for some reason.) Yet he comes off as hopelessly dorky when compared to Lisbeth Salander. It's not her hacking abilities, which are basically magic, that make her so compelling. Lisbeth is a tiny girl with a troubled past, capable of being physically taken advantage of by anyone. Yet Lisbeth Salander doesn't give up. She gets even, usually in the most brutal way possible. She wails on a guy with a five-iron, in a key scene. And don't ask what she does to the man who assaulted her. Her practically monosyllabic personality also hides a secret pain, an intense vulnerability that she's afraid to show anyone even if it's always evident. In other words: She's exactly the kind of woman male readers become fascinated by. Noomi Rapace is a perfect match to the character Larsson wrote.  

Something else “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has in its favor is a hell of a climax. The killer is uncovered when he captures Blomkvist and drags him down to his sterile torture chamber. It's a really exciting ending, that gets the suspense boiling and introduces a truly frightening villain. Niels Arden Oplev directs the hell out of it, with a big car crash and lots of dramatic moments. After that corker of a climax... The movie goes on for another half-hour. This is actually an improvement over the book's belabored denouncement, as the adaptation clips through the laundry list of subplots that needed wrapping up. (A longer television mini-series version of the film, put together in 2010, presumably re-instates many of these scenes and digressions.) Still, it really feels like a movie like this didn't need to be nearly three hours long, the same way the source novel didn't need to be eight hundred some pages.

Still, flaws and all, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” became a lit-world phenomenon for a reason. It's a compelling mystery with a fantastically intriguing female lead. No wonder she got title billing in the English translation. (The dragon tattoo doesn't have much to do with it, despite the space it takes up on the marquee.) It's stylishly directed and has enough memorable sequences to make any extra investment worthwhile. As I said, whether you can tolerate dead and abused women being used as sacrificial plot points in a pulpy mystery will determine a lot of your opinion. I'm not really okay with that but I still think the positive outweighs the negative here. [7/10]