Movie Box Review

The most remarkable thing about David Fincher's version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (written for the English-language screen by Steven Zaillian) is that while remaining, for the most part, scrupulously faithful to the best-selling novel by Stieg Larsson, the new film fits so comfortably with Fincher's style and thematic concerns.

As probably no one needs to be told by now, Dragon Tattoo is the first of a massively popular trilogy of thrillers by the late Swedish novelist Larsson.  It's also, very unusually, already been the source of a quite recent Swedish film, widely seen in the US ($10M at the boxoffice), which was directed by Niels Arden Opley and screenwritten by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg.  The content of the two films overlap greatly, although Fincher and Zaillian have altered the solution to one of the novel's mysteries in a way that's more efficient without changing anything fundamental about the story, and the US version covers some territory omitted from the Swedish adaptation (a distinction that may vanish in the "extended edition" of the Swedish film recently released on video).  

In all of its various forms, Dragon Tattoo centers around a decades-old mystery.  In the 1960s, on a small private island in the north of Sweden largely owned and occupied by the rich and corrupt Vanger family, teenager Harriet Vanger vanished, never to be seen again.  Her only decent relative, patriarch Henrik (Christopher Plummer in the new film) has received taunting yearly reminders of Harriet from, Henrik assumes, her killer.  As Henrik approaches his own appointment with the Grim Reaper, he decides to hire a very unconventional investigator, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), currently in disgrace because of a libel conviction that stems from a story Blomkvist wrote about an industrialist who had once worked for Vanger.

All of this would normally set up an interesting but fairly routine detective story, one in which the initial puzzle leads, as these things do, to other and increasingly more disturbing mysteries that need to be solved.  Larsson's master-stroke, however, was the creation of Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the woman who had performed Vanger's background check on Blomkvist and succeeded in unearthing--legitimately and otherwise--everything there was to know about him, and whom Blomkvist hires to help him with Harriet's case.  Lisbeth is a fabulous character, utterly brilliant and profoundly damaged (due to events disclosed in later books, along with some dreadful experiences she suffers in this one).  Distinctive in every way, from her spiky dyed hair and, yes, many flamboyant tattoos to her more-than-willing violence in the face of some sickening adversity, she takes possession of Larsson's books and the movies as well. 

Fascinatingly, although Lisbeth is of course a preexisting character who wasn't invented by David Fincher, she could be a punk cousin to the Mark Zuckerberg of Fincher's The Social Network, who also overwhelmed everyone around him with his sheer intellect and who otherwise seethed with impatience and frustration at nearly all human interaction.  Lisbeth's outsider status, and the occasional glimpses we get of her longing for human contact, tie her in not just with Zuckerberg but with the title character of Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.   Her style and mindset are reminiscent of  Fight Club's Tyler Durden.  The lengthy, complicated investigation that takes up much of Dragon Tattoo's story recalls Fincher's Zodiac, and although Dragon Tattoo's mystery does come to more of a conclusion than Zodiac's did, the overall sense of moral hopelessness is very similar--and both that, and the psychopathic violence at the story's center, are themes also found in  Se7en.  (Consumer warning:  another way that the film suits Fincher's sensibiliity is in its often extreme violence.  Sensitive souls beware.)

In short, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, while a franchise movie, could have been written with David Fincher in mind.  And although the initial Swedish film is thoroughly competent, and features an extremely strong performance by Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth (later chapters in the series continued to be well-acted, but suffered from directoral changes and seemingly lower budgets), it can't compare with what Fincher--plus a reported $90M budget--can bring to a project.  The photography by Jeff Cronenweth is supple and atmospheric, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's menacing, disturbing score outdoes their work on Social Network.  Despite the 158-minute length, the editing by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall shoots the story out of a gun barrel. 

Fincher has surrounded Rooney Mara with a very fine supporting cast, and that includes Daniel Craig--his Blomkvist may technically be the protagonist of the story, but he too is mere support once Lisbeth enters the scene, and Craig seems content not to get in Mara's way.  Along with Craig and Plummer, Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard and Joely Richardson play important characters with great skill.  But any version of Dragon Tattoo will rise and fall on its Lisbeth, and Mara is all that readers could ask.  Underneath her often deliberately blank exterior, we can see that she's almost entirely an exposed nerve ending, infinitely sensitive to every nuance of her surroundings and constantly gauging her potential for being hurt.  Although Rapace was a superb Lisbeth, Mara is somewhat closer to the character of the book, in her youth and flickers of vulnerability.  It's a great, commanding performance.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, in the end, a genre story, and it obeys the imperatives of the form:  we get the somewhat cliched scenes where a villain starts "monologuing" (as The Incredibles would say) at length before violence, and the sequences where tiny bits of evidence are examined and found to reveal further clues.  Fincher stages all of these beautifully, but they're inescapably familiar.  He and Zaillian also have a problem with the structure of the novel, which keeps going for quite a while after the story's central mysteries have been solved, an extended epilogue dealing with plot points of considerably less interest (the Swedish film, at least in the theatrical-release version, omitted much of this).  The scenes connect to Larsson's larger political points about the nature of Swedish politics and society, and the way in which he saw the various storylines as illustrating the rot afflicting the nation; for an American audience, these are largely lost.  The film can't achieve the perfect roundedness of, say,  Se7en, which owed no allegiance to source material.

Here's a quick primer in Oscar rules and how studios can get around them.  In order for a film to be Oscar-eligible (other than in a few special categories like Documentary and Foreign Film), it needs a theatrical release in the LA area for at least 7 days before it's available on any other platform, like VOD or homevideo.  The Academy insists on this because they don't want to become the Emmys, giving awards to productions that are primarily made for television.  All well and good.  But over the last few years, the distribution model for independent films has changed greatly, and indie studios like Magnolia and IFC, among others, routinely release their films simultaneously in a limited theatrical run and on VOD (maximizing the value of their marketing efforts, among other things).  Technically, films released that way are not eligible for Academy Awards.

So, what to do?  The loophole in the rule turns out to be that word "area," and the fact that there are no other specific rules for the initial release.  Studios can thus have a token run in a single theatre somewhere in the vicinity of Los Angeles, with no advertising and no screenings for critics, just to obtain Oscar eligibility--and then really open the film months down the road.

All of which explains why I schlepped out to join a few dozen other maniacs at the Laemmle theatre in West Hills, CA (about 25 miles from downtown LA), where Magnolia is barely releasing Lars Von Trier's MELANCHOLIA for an under-the-radar 7 day run that will end on Thursday July 28.  (Just to discourage prospective audiences even more, the film only runs once per day, in midafternoon.)   The film will soon be in more deluxe surroundings:  the Toronto Film Festival announced its inclusion yesterday, and it's already won the Best Actress award for star Kirsten Dunst at Cannes.  (This was after Von Trier, not known for his tact, indulged in some ill-advised sarcasm on the subject of Adolf Hitler at a post-screening press conference, causing an international furor and rendering him "persona non grata" at the festival.)

After all that, you ask, how is the movie?  Absorbing and--if you have a high tolerance for European art-film pretentiousness--worthwhile, but even by Von Trier's standards, a tough sit.  Think of it as the profoundly depressing other side of Another Earth's coin:  as in that film, a previously unknown planet is discovered and is approaching Earth, but while that prospect is greeted with hope and wonder in Another Earth, here it's the cause for dread and acknowledgement of inevitable death.  (Not really a spoiler, since the destruction of the planet is the film's dreamy opening sequence.)

Once the end of the world has been established, the film is divided into 2 parts, each named for one of the sisters at its center.  The first half takes place at the grand wedding reception for Justine (Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Sarsgard), which is being hosted by John (Kiefer Sutherland), the fabulously rich husband of Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg)--their estate has an 18-hole golf course, among other things.  The party begins festively enough, but tensions are everywhere--between Justine and Claire, Justine and her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard, Alexander's real-life father--although this being Von Trier, they have no scenes together), and between the girls' divorced parents, the irresponsible Dexter (John Hurt) and bitter Gaby (Charlotte Rampling).  More seriously, it becomes increasingly clear that Justine suffers from a severe case of the title malady, and during the course of the evening, her facade of happiness and normalcy cracks, with disastrous results.

The second half of the story is still at the estate, but all the supporting characters are gone:  Justine has suffered a complete breakdown, and she comes to stay with Justine and John and their young son.  Meanwhile, the newly-discovered planet, which turns out to have the none-too-subtle same name as Justine's mental state, is coming closer to its catastrophic collision with Earth, and everyone is either pretending not to believe it's going to happen, or accepting oncoming death with something like calm satisfaction. 

Some would say Von Trier is as much a cinematic provocateur as he is a filmmaker:  he was at the forefront of the "Dogme" movement that abolished use of background music and artificial light in its films, among other strict rules (not that his own movies often followed them); later projects included the dark musical Dancer In the Dark with Bjork; the surreal miniseries The Kingdom; The Idiots, with its mentally damaged cast members and hardcore sex; Dogville, filmed on an extremely stylized and almost empty soundstage; the racially explosive Manderlay, The Boss Of It All, shot with mechanized, pre-programmed cameras; and Antichrist, which featured explicit sexual mutilation.  So he's not the guy likely to direct the next Marvel superhero movie.  The worth of all these films are open to debate, but they're all fascinating to watch; Melancholia is less so.  After playing with super-slo-mo in the prologue sequence, Von Trier doesn't have much to contribute cinematically other than an insistently jittery hand-held video camera, which is hardly revolutionary these days.  Although the film is well crafted and edited, it's probably the least visually daring thing he's ever shot.

Melancholia continues the mood of grief and psychological violence that marked Antichrist (but without the stomach-turning carnage).  While it's tempting to say somebody should buy Von Trier a box of Cracker Jacks and a DVR Season Pass for Modern Family, there are passages in Melancholia that are emotionally powerful.  Dunst gives a strong, well-thought performance, especially in the first half, as she's dragged inextricably down into the pit of her own disorder, and Gainsbourg, no stranger to art-house misery, brings fresh anguish to the film's second half.  The movie doesn't really go anywhere--it's like a much more pretentious version of Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, where the characters waited to be engulfed by the nuclear clouds that would kill them--but it has respect for its character's despair.

Notwithstanding Magnolia's clever maneuvers, it's doubtful Melancholia will have much of a presence in the Oscar race.  The only real possibility is Dunst's performance, and the fact that her character is deemphasized in the second half doesn't help; also, how many Academy members are likely to watch all 136 minutes of this exercise in doomsday depression?  If the studio gets its hopes up, the film's title is likely to be their mood when the year's nominations are announced.