David O'ConnellThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
January 9th 2012 21:56
Superfluous, extraneous, redundant: all are wantonly applicable to David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the film that Americans deprived of the speed reading capacity to follow subtitles had to have. After ploughing through Stieg Larsson’s novel and two separate exposures to Niels Arden Oplev’s original Swedish film, I now feel thoroughly jaded. The Law of Diminishing Returns has comprehensively claimed this futile incarnation with Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian necessarily subservient to a narrative that’s been picked clean like a carcass tossed into a nest of vultures.
Pre-screening, I wondered whether it was still possible to extract anything more from what is essentially a pedestrian tale of a family’s corrosive evil entanglement with Nazi-ism, misogyny and sexual abuse; all to be exorcised or at least flushed into the light by a disgraced journalist hard up for a buck. My apathy upon reaching the painfully protracted conclusion confirms the answer is no.
Summoned to the snowy Swedish outskirts of the remote and isolated Hedestad by fading billionaire Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is asked to dig into a decades old mystery – the disappearance of Vanger’s favourite niece. The cover story will be a biography of the old man whilst Blomkvist surreptitiously gathers background on the hateful clan. Later, he seeks the assistance of an expert hacker and troubled ward of the state, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), whose tussle with an abusive legal guardian mirrors the kind of distasteful human urges Blomkvist is set to uncover on Hedestad.
Craig admittedly fits the terrain like a glove, his stone exterior soon comfortably nestled against the frosty palette and nefarious history of this place. It’s Mara who suffers comparatively as Salander; hers is a weak approximation of Noomi Rapace’s searing performance. The hindrance of an obligatory but nonetheless silly Swedish accented English is no help – nor is it to Plummer, Robin Wright Penn and others, yet Craig coasts by on his unexplained British accent. Mara is feeble, lacking the presence that Rapace could project with a single icy, dark-eyed glaze.
It pains me to label any Fincher film irrelevant but that’s exactly what The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is. Though naturally exuding a more overt cinematic flair than Oplev’s film, it somehow lacks menace. Nor can it avoid a feeling of connecting the dots in adhering to the original without ever risking a daring diversion or two. The electronic soundscapes of Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s bland, generic score become tiresomely one-note, completing the disheartening picture of a great director lowering himself to the ranks of stock standard filmmaking – a project set in motion with the express and somewhat soulless purpose of cashing in on a trendy, sub-literary global phenomenon.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, January 12.
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