Some years ago I read a review (maybe in the Guardian, or maybe in some mystery-centered blog I was following) that was gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about a book called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that had just come out in the UK. I checked on Amazon; no such book had a page. I figured it was a Swedish novel that wasn’t coming to the US. So I ordered it.
In hardback.
From the UK.
When I read it, I thought, “Darin’s going to kill me if he finds out how much I paid for a book that I absolutely loathe.”
I managed to finish it and put it away, out of sight, out of mind.
At which point The Girl came to the US, and there’s been tons of gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about it and I’ve been baffled. What is wrong with you people?
When I heard there was a US remake of the Swedish movie coming out, I thought, Nope, not seeing that. But then it was David Fincher directing…and Steve Zaillian writing… and there was nothing else to see last night…
And…I still don’t get it. Actually, it’s even worse than that. I think you people are insane.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the story of a disgraced journalist (Daniel Craig) who gets a hail-Mary pass from a wealthy industrialist (Christopher Plummer) who will pay him a huge amount of money to use his amazing deductive skills —
(During the scene where Plummer hires Craig, Darin leaned over to me and said, “This is a total wish fulfillment story.” I said, “Oh yeah.”)
— to investigate the murder of a girl on a remote island 40 years ago. He is aided in this quest by the antisocial, yet amazingly brilliant and super-competent Rooney Mara. Because of the Law of Conservation of Movie Stars (“Today’s movie budgets don’t allow you to fill the whole movie with stars, so if there’s an actor you recognize in a small role, you can bet they’re important”), it’s not hard to figure out who the bad guy is. The Law of Conservation also allows you to figure something else out ahead of time, but I’ll leave that to the viewer.
Let me get the good out of the way: the direction, the art direction, the acting, and the dialogue were great. This feels like a European movie, as opposed to most American movies, which feel like they were filmed on a Universal backlot (even if they were filmed on location). Everyone (except Craig) has a Swedish accent (with various degrees). The score by Trent Reznor is great.
I still hated it. There are so many problems with this movie, most of which come from the source material.
The original title of the book in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women, and that’s a more apt title than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Everything about this story has to do with violence, particularly sexual violence, toward women. Drew McWeeny at HitFix had a good essay recently about when are we, the Viewers, going to start drawing the line at depictions of rape and sexual violence in movies? Is that a good topic for drama or for crime? Of course. But as McWeeny and others have pointed out, often it’s all we get. And we’re offered sexual violence and that’s supposed to be meaningful in and of itself. Even worse, it’s often so explicitly offered that it’s not violence, it’s pornography: it’s meant to titillate.
There’s a whole bit of backstory, just touched on in the movie (I can’t remember whether it’s dealt with more in the novel or not) about Sweden’s history with the Nazis. Huh, that’s interesting…but never pursued. One of the bad guys was involved with the Swedish Nazi party. Is that part of what he did? We don’t know. Is it coincidence that he was a Nazi and a psychopath? Are we simply supposed to equate Naziism with psychopathy? (If so, congratulations: you’ve just cheapened one of the most complex psychological and political situations we’ve ever had to face on this planet.) The whole reason one whole series of girls dies is because they’re “Jewish” or “immigrants” — a factor never explored, just touched on, as though, y’know, we all know about that.
The murder mystery involves several generations of a wealthy Swedish industrialist’s family. There’s a particularly…unusual…psychological dynamic between one of the mid-40s generation and one of the mid-60s generation that’s an important part of the story, and we’re never given any idea how in the hell this happened. Did one teach the other? Does it run in the family? Is it just that they’re Swedish? Or is living on this island making them crazy? We don’t know. We’re just supposed to take it as given that such a thing is possible and apparently no one else in this family, who all live in close quarters, ever noticed. Um, okay.
Much more up close and personal, however, is The Scene, and then The Aftermath Scene. In case you haven’t heard, one of the main characters gets raped, extremely brutally. (She actually gets raped twice, but people pretty much only refer to the second rape when talking about “the horrible rape scene.”) This happens on-screen in the movie; it goes on for pages, with extreme detail, in the book. She then exacts her revenge, in a similarly brutal way, also explicit in book and movie.
The entire point of these scenes in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is that as a result of all of this she gets money. That’s it.
I’ve read a number of places that “Oh, this sets up some stuff in the later books” — I don’t care. In this movie and this book, the end result of two rapes and a revenge assault is that she gets money. She gets access to her own money without any consequences whatsoever. That’s the entire point of this story arc in Dragon Tattoo and it infuriates me.
She isn’t affected emotionally — she not only has other lovers right away, she becomes so emotionally involved with one of them that she undertakes a ridiculous, over-the-top international scheme to right a wrong done to Daniel Craig’s character. She’s not overly clingy or emotionally needy; she isn’t standoffish. No, she’s perfectly well-adjusted sexually and emotionally. Horrifying, painful rape? No problem! Horrible physical and mental assault you perpetrate on someone else? Just do it! You’ll barely remember it happened five minutes later.
She isn’t affected physically. She has no concern about strangers, about her own body, about where she is at any time.
She isn’t affected at all. The same extraordinarily gifted, socially-maladjusted woman we see at the beginning of the movie is exactly the same at the end of the movie.
I haven’t worked in rape counseling…can anybody tell me if this is how it works?
I also got the feeling, from the book and movie and from lots of reactions I’ve read, that we’re supposed to see Salander’s Revenge Assault as “empowering.” That we’re supposed to cheer her on because “he deserved it.” I got a different message from it: if you’re a technical genius who happens to film her own rape and if you happen to have access to lots of computer equipment and if you’re willing to engage in horrible, bloody assault, you are empowered. Otherwise, suck it: you’re a wimp.
The best thing in this movie is that apparently absolutely everyone in Sweden uses Macintosh, so that’s good.
(I totally forgot to mention at least 25% of this movie is people staring at photos or at newspaper clippings or computer screens, and then they react as though they’ve seen something incredibly significant…that’s completely non-obvious to us, the viewer. It’s not deeply interesting dramatically, to say the least.)
TOTALLY agree, Diane. I hated the book. I will not see the movie. I basically don’t get it.
I found the first third of the book to be boring (like reading the financial records of a particularly uninteresting small business) and the latter two thirds to be just gross and misogynistic.
Knowing that the book was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women” actually makes me hate the book a bit less, because it indicates that the author at least realized that the book was just full of awful things. In my head, I was thinking that he was just being sensationalistic and didn’t realize how awful he was being.
Blech.
I thought it was more like 45% of the movie was just looking at pictures, etc. There are long stretches of time where there’s zero dialogue.
Nina: you could totally be right about that. There’s definitely a LOT of it, and it has no meaning to the viewer. (I seem to remember the book had a lot of it too.) There’s one scene where Daniel Craig is looking at a series of 3 or 4 photos in a row, over and over again, and it’s like, “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
Darin’s reaction was: “Is this going to be the Blade Runner scene again?”
Sho: yeah, the book and the movie seem to gyrate wildly between the boring and formulaic and the wildly violent and horrible. You never knew what you were going to get.
The wish fulfillment parts (which apparently get WORSE in later novels) are also quite obnoxious. “Gosh, you’ve just been convicted of libel and lost your entire savings! Good thing this industrialist is willing to throw a ton of money at you to investigate a 40 year old crime!”
I slogged through the first of the trilogy with two alarms sounding in my head: (spoiler for the few who passed on the book and either movie) SHE’S NOT DEAD, AND SHE HAS BEEN TELLING YOU SO FOR 20 YEARS; and “why are all these women tumbling into bed with a nerdy journalist?” As you say, total wish fulfillment from the journalist/novelist. The Swedish movies addressed both those problems by shoving the non-mystery from long ago somewhat into the background and by providing the journalist with fewer one night stands. On Charley Rose the screen writer described the character as a slut and said she had reined him in closer to believability.
The most strikingly improved image between the book and the movie is the tattoo itself. In the book our novelist/journalist seems out of his comfort zone describing a goth woman, so she has a tattoo of a dragon on her shoulder blade. In the movie it is revealed as a major work of art covering her back and trailing down her leg and seeming to burst through her skin.
Noomi Rapace, as Salander, projected volcanic anger underlying her character that fit the image she had had inked on her back. From all reviews of the new movie, which I haven’t found a reason to see, the heat of that anger in the original helps get one past her reaction to the rape scene, as does an earlier assault on a subway.
As a foreign film, this version also skipped past the Law of Conservation of Movie Stars because I had no clue who any one them was or had been in the past.
Just as I saw no reason to read the other books in the series nor see the Hollywood version of the movie, I can offer no reason to go back to the Swedish version unless you want a somewhat academic comparison of two takes on an over-hyped book.
But now I’m wishing for a Swedish take on Ides of March so I can see how it might have been done so much better with so much less budget and actors with so much less recognition factors.