Book vs. Movie vs. Movie: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
By Russ Bickerstaff
January 2, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Swedish journalist/activist Stieg Larsson had been a fan of science fiction. He taught women revolutionaries to use grenade launchers. He did research on right-wing extremism in Sweden. He died in late 2004, leaving behind three novels that he wrote for his own pleasure. Novels he’d never tried to have published. When they were published, they became international best sellers. Naturally, Swedish filmmakers were quite interested in adapting the series to film, which also became a hit internationally. Originally titled Men Who Hate Women, the first novel in the trilogy now meets its second feature film adaptation. The original Swedish film adaptation made over $100 million on a $13 million budget. Directed by David Fincher, the Hollywood film adaptation cost roughly $100 million to make. How does it measure up to the original novel and film?
The Book
Stieg Larsson witnessed the gang rape of a young girl when he was 15. It’s possible that a lot of his life had been shaped by that event. Witnessing that kind of atrocity at an early age tends to make an activist out of anyone with a conscience. In some sense, the novel seems to have been a desire for Larsson to come to terms with not doing anything about that when he had the chance. The girl’s name was Lisbeth... which also happens to be the name of the girl referred to in the book’s English title.
The novel is a contemporary thriller that reads in places like an espionage thriller and in others like... a particularly twisted mutation of a Lifetime Movie. As the book opens, we are introduced to Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who is also publisher of a Swedish current affairs magazine called Millennium. After being made aware of possible corruption on the part of billionaire industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, he’d published a story that the courts had found to be libelous. Down on his luck, Blomkvist is offered proof of Wennerström’s wrongdoing (and more than a little money) in exchange for doing a family history of on Henrik Vanger. Vanger believes that a distant niece Harriet was murdered and he wants Blomkvist to find out what happened to her.
Blomkvist is ultimately aided in his research by a girl who worked for a security firm that had done a background check on Vanger - a girl named Lisbeth. The English translator/publishers were right in identifying the central marketing element of the novel. Lisbeth Salander is easily the single most interesting character in the story. And while the story itself is highly engaging on a number of levels, it never really matches the level of interest generated by Salander.
Being a street-smart hacker, Salander is a cyberpunk heroine. She’s more of an earthbound, slightly less surreal version of William Gibson’s Molly Millions. She’s an interesting evolution of the cyberpunk - the figure who can peacefully coexist with an ominously powerful system she is capable of completely undermining by seamlessly walking in and out of some of the most intense security imaginable. She’s got a dark background - sexual abuse from a legal guardian who she later went on to torture. The dark background feeds the mystery of a character seemingly capable of getting information about anything. The subject of now four films in two years, Salander would stand a very real chance of being our next James Bond if the estate of the author would allow it. (The Swedish adaptation of the three-part series was released in its entirety in ’09. If another writer were to pick-up the character and take her to other parts of the world, it could be very interesting and very, very lucrative.) A woman of poor social skills with a punk fashion sensibility who nonetheless is brilliant in a line of work that can be dangerous. That sort of thing has real potential for a long-running multi-media franchise.
Beyond its action-suspense appeal, the novel does show some of the emotional complexity of sexual abuse - a theme which hits the plot at numerous points in the course of things. And while it’s nice to see that sort of thing explored realistically in a popular format, the seriousness of it IS compromised a bit by the larger-than-life nature of the suspense. Likewise, it’s nice to see some of the excesses of big business used as kind of a sinister backdrop for a story about physical abuse, but casting that against the plot of an amplified, semi-surrealistic suspense novel runs the risk of trivializing the very real, very twisted actions of the super-rich at the dawn of the 21st century.
Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Nordisk Film, 2009)
The original 2009 film was an indigenous Swedish film, making for a very authentic feel, straight down to the last detail. Michael Nyqvist plays Mikael Blomkvist with a casual disinterest as the film goes through the motions of setting-up the premise over the course of the film’s first half hour or so. The film’s first quarter hour follows a heavily abbreviated version of the first handful of scenes in the novel. It’s all there more or less, but it lacks the depth and finesse of the original text.
Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander. She’d done some work prior to this film, but this was a big breakout role for her that found her rolling into greater prominence in the international cinema - most recently picking up work in the latest Sherlock Holmes film. She’s got a kind of intensity onscreen that suits the character well. There’s a kind of silently observant precision about her performance that feels very true to the character, but much of the character's subtlety is robbed by a script that has been forced to truncate things. Thankfully, director Niels Arden Oplev allows enough silent moments onscreen for Rapace to work with in the process of moving from one scene to the next. Rapace may not come across quite as cold and meticulous as she does in the novel. Actually, she looks a bit more like a model trying to look punk than a legitimate punk, but her performance carries enough of what it needs to make for a remarkably compelling performance.
There’s a lack of physical grittiness to the film that tarnishes the whole thing a bit. It all feels a little sterile where it shouldn’t and the film feels remarkably clean, even in its darker moments. That lack of physical, textural complexity feeds into the films treatment of the novel, which is a similarly pristine affair with few details that carry the kind of lush ambiguity that is so abundant in Larsson’s original novel. As a result, the mystery elements of the suspense are conspicuously absent. Not that they aren’t present at all, (this is a mystery at its heart) but without a deep presentation of all the tiny details, the film can only focus on some of the drama behind the mystery.
Following as it does a book with some pretty tight pacing, the film feels a lot more Hollywood than many European films. Things move along pretty quickly, but so much of the story plays out in relatively simple exposition that is, in all fairness, delivered with a really solid sense of dramatic reality. The problem is that fairly good acting performances end up existing in kind of a strange vacuum. Though there is no mistaking the authenticity of the film’s setting, there simply isn’t enough atmosphere around the basic elements of the central mystery to feel at all substantial.
The film ends up feeling like a strange museum diorama. All of the elements feel a authentic and they’re all in the right order (more or less), but they lack enough atmosphere to feel completely authentic beyond those few pieces that are in the center of the frame at any one moment. And what’s there is beautiful and horrifying at times. In addition to being able to pull some pretty solid performances out of the cast, Oplev sculpts some pretty beautiful shots in here in some pretty interesting moments. True, much of it looks made for TV, but every now and then there’s a moment that really pops and it ends up being some really beautiful filmmaking.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Columbia Pictures and MGM, 2011)
With 1999’s Fight Club, Director David Fincher had made a truly brilliant novel into an even more brilliant film. It comes as little surprise that he’s able to make a remarkably compelling film with Larsson’s novel. Working from a script credited to Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York) he crafts a remarkably tight two and half hour feature film. That it’s able to feel as fluid and fast-paced as it is for length of time is an accomplishment in and of itself. How Fincher accomplishes this involves a great many smaller accomplishments.
In stark contrast to Oplev’s work, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has a rich physical depth to it. With a background in music videos, Fincher has a brilliant sense of just how much to put in the shot without making it look cluttered. As a result, there are a profound number of details that flit through the film, making it feel rich and atmospheric even when it has no real business doing so. The film’s shooting locations include quite a few places in Sweden, so it's safe to say that the look of the film is authentic.
The cast is quite international. British actor Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist. His single most charismatic performance since 2004’s Layer Cake, Craig is remarkably compelling here as a man struggling against people with far more power than he has. Craig’s Blomqvist appears far more active than that of Nyqvist in the original film. There’s more of a textured edginess to the character that balances out the central dramatic dynamic of the film far better than the 2009 original.
Salander is played by American actress Rooney Mara. A beautiful woman, it would’ve been really easy to make Mara look like a glamour Salander. Instead, Fincher allows her to look very, very punk. Mara plays the cold precision of the character with great style by simply allowing the fantastic darkness of the world around her to pass by without reacting to it. Her affectless appearance brings out a depth that would’ve been very, very difficult to manage without Fincher’s direction. In order for her brilliantly cold performance to work as well as it does, everything else in the film has to seem precisely as overpowering as it is.
Of particular note is Fincher’s handling of online research. The Internet has been around for a long time, and movies have tried to bring its reality to the big screen - failing pretty consistently. Prior to this movie, I don’t ever recall seeing a film so successfully bring an edgy sense of drama of Internet research to the screen. This might be the first time the Internet has looked good in film. Fincher’s careful direction (and, no doubt some really amazing cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth) make the tension of a couple of people doing computer research actually seem kind of intense and compelling in film format.
Fincher and company’s handling of the rich intensity of every aspect of the film allows long bits of exposition to come across beautifully onscreen. The Zaillian script draws poetry out of the dialogue not found in the original novel and manages to crystallize certain aspects of the plot much better than Larsson did in the original novel. Yes, it IS a 158 minute film, but what it’s able to get across in 158 minutes onscreen is a lot more concise and compelling than what Larsson had in a rather exhaustive novel. Yes, there were more details and there was a lot more background in the original novel, but the drama of what was going on kind of got lost. The pacing of Fincher’s film takes a good book and makes a great film out of it.
The Verdict
Even if this latest film is successful enough to spawn a whole series of other Salander films, there’s little doubt that the original novel is going to be remembered far better than any movie made of it. The novels were hugely successful and have a kind of following that seems unlikely to translate into any cinematic adaptation. Produced as they were entirely in the home of the novel’s author, the original films are likely to have a special place in the hearts of Swedes and other Europeans, but Fincher’s adaptation of the original novel is simply a richer, more concise and better executed work of art than any of the rest of the work that has made it to the public thus far.