- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Directed by David Fincher. Starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.
Rating: 7 (out of 10)
IT was a daunting enough task to adapt Stieg Larsson's provocative bestselling novels for the big screen: imagine remaking a superlative foreign language film trilogy for an English audience.
Less than 10 per cent of the Swedish film's payday came from this side of the Atlantic, however, so a remake aimed at a subtitlephobic North American audience was inevitable.
Mercifully, David Fincher proves up to the challenge with his take on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, starring Daniel Craig as rumpled hero Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, the punky computer hacker who, unless you've read the books or seen the films, nearly defies description.
The film opens with Mikael's fall from grace as co-editor of a Swedish news magazine, sued for libel and bankrupted by hefty fines. Soon after, Mikael is summoned to a meeting in the north country, to a frigid and isolated manor four hours by train from Stockholm, where he is tasked with solving the 40year-old murder of Harriet Vanger.
Mikael needs the money, so he's in. Plus he's intrigued: the high-placed, well moneyed Vanger family is littered with Nazis and abuse of one kind or another; they all live on an island, and don't speak to one another. And despite the fact that Harriet has been missing and presumed dead for decades, someone sends a tormenting yearly reminder to Vanger patriarch Henrik (Christopher Plummer).
Lisbeth is solicited by Mikael because of her superior computer hacking and sleuthing skills (she did the background check on him) and the two find themselves in increasingly intense and dangerous situations as the investigation progresses.
Running parallel to the mystery is the pathetic plight of Lisbeth, now an adult ward of the state and under the care of a masochistic psychiatrist (Yorick van Wageningen), who abuses his power horrifically. These scenes, and Lisbeth's revenge, are just as gruelling for the viewer as those in director Niels Arden Oplev's Swedish original. There's a razor-thin line here between art and really vile porn, so tread carefully.
Thought too good-looking to play Mikael, Craig proves just craggy and sallow enough to effectively portray the chainsmoking journalist (a far cry from Craig's famous teeny-trunks emergence from the surf in Casino Royale). That he lets himself be seduced without protest by an emotionally damaged girl not that far in age from his own daughter is just as cagey here as it was in the original, but if you view Mikael as almost as damaged, it almost works.
Mara, known mostly before now as that girl in the bar scene of The Social Network, throws herself into the role, body (all of it) and soul. At first glance the actor only has to channel "weird" and "intense", but these would be nothing without the fragility Mara brings to her seemingly tough-as-nails character.
The film zips stylishly along, even at 158 minutes, and sets up a sequel nicely. Production value is high, as it should be with a budget of $90 million (versus $13 million for the Swedish original), and makes Sweden look like one of the most dangerous places in the world in which to grow up.
(They don't tell you that in the Ikea catalogue.) No tangible improvement on the original film, but this Girl is sure to be a hit with English-speaking viewers.
