Dir: David Fincher; Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård
Cert 18, 157 min
David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulp thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo marks an odd milestone in his directorial career: it’s the first of his films that feels beneath him. For once, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker's flair for marshalling large casts of characters and mapping out complex storylines works against him: without any surface confusion, the essential flimsiness of Larsson’s million-selling whodunit is all too visible.
Rooney Mara glistens like a sharpened icicle as Lisbeth Salander, a sallow, callow computer hacker who’s drawn into a murder investigation in Sweden’s snow-cloaked north. The elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires her to perform a comprehensive background check on the investigative journalist Mikhail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), whom Vanger wants to look into the unsolved murder of his grand-niece. Blomkvist accepts the job and hires Salander as his assistant, realising that her ability to inveigle information out of computers might be as useful as his knack for doing the same thing to people.
While very few viewers will come to this film fresh – the novel has sold 65 million copies worldwide and six million people have already seen the 2009 Swedish-language screen adaptation, directed by Niels Arden Oplev – at least it starts unexpectedly, with a pointedly James Bond-ish title sequence complete with writhing females coated in black gunk and Trent Reznor’s thundering cover version of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”.
It’s just one example of Dragon Tattoo’s typically high standard of craftsmanship: Steven Zaillian’s script irons out some narrative kinks from the novel, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall’s nimble editing keeps things moving and I suspect cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth may be part Eskimo, because he has more than 100 different ways to film snow. Mara is fearless in the lead role and Craig generously allows her to take centre stage, but as a result his Blomkvist lacks the grizzled gumption that made Michael Nyqvist’s performance in Oplev’s version so compelling.
Perhaps unavoidably, it’s the source material itself that trips the film up. The notorious scenes of graphic sexual abuse prove to be a major stumbling block: they’re lurid and sweaty in a way that’s tonally dischordant with the rest of the story, and the ‘surprise villain’ is no more surprising here than in the Oplev film: the role’s so unsubtle that the actor or actress might as well be wearing a pair of hen party devil horns and carrying a plastic pitchfork.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a success on its own terms, but every aspect of it is overshadowed by another of Fincher’s films: its doomy soundtrack, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is a lesser retread of their work on The Social Network, and its knotty plotting is comprehensively out-red-herringed by the masterful Zodiac. As such it’s easy to see why the director wanted to make it, but hard to shake the feeling that perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered.
In UK cinemas 26 December 2011
