The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

As mentioned here back in the winter, I read the second book of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Therefore it was a strange sensation to see the film version of the first book, the wildly popular The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I knew the characters, but not the details of the story. As such, it's a decent if over-padded mystery with a moral stance.

The film, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, introduces us to a journalist (Michael Nyquist) who is going to jail for libel. He was set up, but is willing to forgo an appeal and serve his sentence. Before he is sent up, though, he has time to perform some work for hire for a rich industrialist. The job--find out what happened to his niece way back in 1966, when she disappeared off an island that had only way off--a bridge that at the time was blocked by a crashed truck.

That mystery is basic Agatha Christie stuff, but it morphs into something more ghoulish when Nyquist discovers that the girl may have disappeared because she stumbled upon a serial killer who killed young girls based on Biblical quotations. This killer clearly has a problem with women who deviate from any kind of norm, and seems to have a problem with Jews as well, as all the girls are Jewish, and many members of the industrialist's family were Nazis.

That plot would be enough for most films, but it's only half of it. The other major character, and where the title gets its name, is a young woman (Noomi Rapace), a computer researcher/hacker who also has a face full of piercings, wears leather clothing, and spent much of her youth in mental hospitals. In reading Larsson's books, it's clear he took special pride in creating her, and though she's a bit of a male fantasy--she's also bisexual!--Rapace makes her more interesting than she has a right to be. She teams up with Nyquist on the case, and the two make an interesting odd couple, but when they become sexually intimate I rolled my eyes. I knew it was coming, but it was so out of character for the girl that I chalked it up to a writer (Larsson, that is) who must have had fantasies about being involved with a downtown chick.

Then there's the question of the violence. This film is not for the squeamish, and contains a rape scene that is one of the more brutal in recent years, at least for a higher class movie. There is also a scene of retribution that will make some squirm, involving a dildo and some primitive tattoo equipment. In certain respects these scenes are not central to the missing girl mystery--they exist only to define Rapace's character, which will be explored more fully over the arc of the next two films in the trilogy. It should be noted that these three books were all an attempt to address the sexual exploitation of women--the original title of the book and film in Sweden is "Men Who Hate Women."

I had resisted seeing this for a while because I knew it was going to be remade by an American studio in the near future, and figured I'd just wait for that. But I was glad I saw it, because the Hollywood version will probably tone down the "men who hate women" stuff. It's hard to imagine that the rape and retribution scenes will be as brutal as they are here.