The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Director: David Fincher
Main cast: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgard, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright

I went to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last Thursday morning (January 12^th) with my wife at Lotte Cinema here in Wonju. We weren’t quite the only people in the theatre, which isn’t surprising for a weekday morning matinée, and I prefer to have as few strangers around as possible when watching a movie.  I'm a bit of a fan of David Fincher's movies; The Social Network (2010) was my favourite film of last year and his 2011 offering was one of my most anticipated film's of 2011. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is not a bad movie, and I do recommend seeing it. That being said, I didn't like it tremendously, and this reflection is likely to highlight the negatives more than the positives because it’s the negatives that have stayed with me since viewing the film.

The lights dimmed, I cleaned my glasses, and the movie started, and I had problems with it almost immediately. The sound mix in the opening scenes (before and after the title sequence) seemed terrible. Perhaps this was a problem with the theatre’s audio system, but I didn’t notice any problems for the rest of the film. Perhaps it took me a while to become accustomed to the accents of mostly non-Swedish actors sounding Scandinavian or perhaps it was just my brain trying to figure out what was going on. The opening of a mystery should pose a lot of questions, but this film’s opening was disjointed and baffling to me. The scenes immediately before and after the title sequence are thermally cool and slow. That’s fine, but in-between is an eye-catching, pulsating title sequence that is, to my mind, at odds with the tone of the film so far and the film to come. Done in shades of black and punctuated by oily malevolence and a rousing cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, the title sequence plays both as homage to and perversion of James Bond. Audio references to Vikings and  lands of ice and snow aside,  it also sets up fetishistic and pace expectations that are not part of the film at all. The song works perfectly well in this trailer, but not in the film itself. One trailer for The Social Network made brilliant use of a cover of Radiohead's "Creep", but that song was nowhere to be found in the finished film; Fincher should have followed the same practice here. Fincher is well-known for captivating title sequences (Panic Room, Fight Club, and most notably, Se7en), and while the title sequence is memorable and beautiful, it doesn't have the level of effectiveness as, for example, the muted and tonally relevant title sequence from the aforementioned  The Social Network.

This leads me to another aspect of the film that didn’t sit well: comparison to Fincher’s other work. Now, I believe that every film should be looked at on its own, but I like directors and am a fan of Fincher’s previous work. With The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I don’t think Fincher has added anything new to content he has already excellently covered in Se7en and Zodiac. It could be that the story of Stieg Larsson’s novel owes a lot to the grisly, religiously themed serial murders depicted in Se7en, but that only adds to the lack of necessity for Fincher, in particular, to make this film. Zodiac is a film of completely different tone, pacing, and conclusion. Both Se7en and Zodiac frustrate the viewer by the end in completely different and completely effective, purposeful ways. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo feels like an imitation. I think my biggest problem here could be with the source material and with Fincher’s inability to rise above it.

The mystery central to the plot of the film was not very compelling. One problem was the casting of Stellan Skarsgard; it was a dead give-away as to who the killer was. And, the mystery of Harriet was either tipped off too easily or I was too keyed in to the conventions of this kind of plot. Either way, I was not invested in the crime or the investigation. Credit here, though, to Fincher for keeping me interested with his pacing of the film and his camerawork. The film is never boring and it is beautiful in composition.

Like I stated before, I do think people should seek out this film. It is well-crafted, well-shot, and well –performed; it is thematically interesting and doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator. It is a grown up film for grown-ups and the type of movie that should be supported. Even if it is perhaps an unnecessary film from Fincher, a weak Fincher movie is still better than most Hollywood fare.

I have not, so far, talked about the most interesting aspects of the film: Lisbeth Salander and the depiction of sexual violence. I will cover these topics in an upcoming post.

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