The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 2.5/4
Music Box Films, Unrated
While The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow has spent decades pursuing obsessions linked to warped macho attitudes from a female point of view, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in a playful yet scary gender subversion, imagines male behavioral conventions instead enacted by a female. The result is creepier than you can ever imagine. We’re talking a ballsy babe who knows how to rescue her timid man from danger and doesn’t think twice about dealing with a serial sexual predator by raping him right back.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on the first of three novels that form the Millennium Trilogy by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, who, in an extreme case of life imitating art, died suddenly just before the first novel, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, was published. After his death, that book elevated Larsson to the title of second best selling writer last year, and became 2009’s highest grossing movie in Europe.
Noomi Rapace stars in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Michael Nyqvist plays Mikael, a muckraker journalist who is framed and convicted after exposing unscrupulous Swedish business conglomerates. While awaiting the date he’s scheduled to turn himself in for a short prison term, the glum reporter agrees to be hired by another wealthy tycoon: Henrik (Sven-Bertil Taube) wants Mikael to look into the vanishing of his teenage niece some years ago, and suspects members of his own notorious Vanger family, implicated in Third World drug trafficking and gun running, of complicity in her disappearance.
At the same time, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), a brash young goth gumshoe with the dragon tattoo in question, takes an interest in Mikael’s widely publicized plight. And she begins stalking him, when not dodging a lecherous, depraved legal guardian. Eventually the pair becomes partners and then lovers, discovering a lot more about the deviant behavior of that elite clan than they might ever care to know.
Though it’s mentioned in passing that the Vangers harbored many right wing fanatics and former Nazis, this fact is reduced to less than a footnote. Instead, a kind of tabloid cinema emphasis is placed on linking sexual perversion and worse to financial corruption among the elites. Larsson himself devoted his life to uncovering economic conspiracies at the highest levels, and may have paid the price: A reporter for the Swedish Communist Workers League newspaper and ardent left activist, Larsson was stalked, hounded, and threatened with death by right wing extremists, ultimately forced into hiding under such stressful conditions that he succumbed to a massive heart attack and died suddenly in 2004 at the age of 50.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a tense, engaging thriller with a highly unusual, icy and temperamental female protagonist at its center. The problem here is that she tends to be more fascinating than anything else going on, and the tossing together of a tepid, lurid mystery with the more potent enigma of the masculinization of a profoundly sexually damaged female psyche is an odd combination that never quite gels. On a surprising side note, prisons in Sweden seem quite inviting, more like comfy college dorms designed for reflection and redemption than what awaits inmates in the U.S.
