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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.

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