The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

It can't have been easy to adapt Swedish author Stieg Larsson's bestselling novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for the big screen, so screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg deserve a respectable pat on the back for putting forth an acceptable effort. At over six hundred and forty pages in length, Larsson's book (the first in the incredibly popular Millennium trilogy) is a mediocre murder mystery stuffed with several hundred pages of unnecessary fluff. Chopping off a colossal chunk of that narrative fat is imperative if there is any hope of maintaining some level of cinematic energy.

So it is nice to see that, right from the beginning, Arcel and Heisterberg are willing to excise huge swaths of Larsson's meandering prose. Gone are the seemingly endless piles of back-story that dominate the first few hundred pages of the book. Larsson definitely put a lot of thought into every nook and cranny of his story, but it rarely adds up to much and his penchant for explaining every minute detail of someone's life or situation ends up stifling the actual plot at the book's core. Arcel and Heisterberg aren't afraid to let their screenplay roam beyond the confines of Larsson's puffy novel, but they're still handcuffed by the characters and overall intentions.

At times, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a much better movie than Larsson's book deserves. Arcel and Heisterberg, along with director Niels Arden Oplev, know how to cut to the chase on cinematic terms, which is especially important in a movie adapted from a book with such a clumsy first act. The urgency with which the trio expedite the narrative in the first hour is quite exciting for anyone who feels Larsson's book is laughably long-winded. But while the adaptation is initially worthy of praise, the challenges of cramming so much information into the frame of a single movie eventually proves to be too daunting a task for the filmmakers.

Larsson's novel is a sprawling tale of intersecting plotlines involving big business corruption, journalistic integrity, dysfunctional family drama, and a forty-year-old murder mystery. It's a lot to chew on and far too much to expect one movie to hold, so this cinematic version wisely focuses the majority of its sights on the murder mystery portion of the plot. When disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist, a veritable black hole of sunken charisma) is wooed to the Swedish countryside by a wealthy elderly man named Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), he soon finds himself wrapped up in a mystery that has haunted Henrik for several decades.

As Henrik explains, most of his family is a bunch of a Nazi-loving jerks who live in close proximity to each other for no better reason than to hurl death stares at each other on a regular basis. One of the only family members who Henrik ever cared deeply about was his ill-fated niece Harriet, who disappeared back in 1966. The distraught Henrik has struggled to solve the mystery ever since then and remains convinced that someone in the family killed Harriet and has covered it up all these years.

Mikael listens to the story without knowing what his own role in the dusty investigation will be. He doesn't plan to stay long in this Swedish version of the middle of nowhere, but despite his early reservations, he soon relocates to the small village where the Vanger family resides and begins pouring over the evidence in a last-ditch effort to solve Harriet's murder. Despite covering a good chunk of the early plot development, this entire synopsis has little to do with the title, which is given life in the form of twenty-four-year-old goth girl Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, in what is the movie's closest thing to a standout performance).

Lisbeth is a computer hacking genius with a gigantic chip on her shoulder. She has her own storyline that ties into the main theme of the movie (the evils of misogyny), but her character arc eventually collides with Mikael's adventure. The pair team up to solve the Harriet mystery and it is here, in both book and movie, that the plot begins to barrel forward at a previously dormant pace. But it is also here where the movie version begins to go off the rails. While the first half of Larsson's book practically begs to be sliced and diced with a cinematic blade, the second half is significantly more eventful.

As the mystery plot careens toward its climax, the movie begins to feel uncomfortably hurried, as if Arcel, Heisterberg, and Oplev can feel the narrative walls closing in and their time running out. While they still manage to get the main points from the page to the screen, the story is suddenly so rushed that it seems to sacrifice the complexities of the novel that at least prove Larsson wasn't completely asleep when he typed this yarn up. Plus, it doesn't help that the mystery isn't particularly interesting to begin with. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a glorified episode of CSI: Sweden, if such a thing were to exist.

Mikael and Lisbeth do make an unusual team, but only one member is worth paying any attention to. While the titular character is often intriguing, with her unique look and incredible, often silent intelligence, Mikael proves to be just as boring on the screen as he is on the page. Both characters are given heavy loads of back-story in the novel, which is then considerably stripped down for the movie. This requires the actors to actually communicate various information in more subtle and personal ways, but only Rapace is willing to convincingly rise to the challenge. Nyqvist is just there, standing in front of the camera, looking like he has no idea what the hell is going on. Don't worry, buddy. You're not missing much.

With so many novel-to-film adaptations, the success or failure of the picture begins and ends with the source material. Some good books are turned into bad movies and vice versa. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn't really fit one of those moulds. It's a case of a mediocre novel being transformed into a better, though still ultimately mediocre movie. I sincerely applaud Arcel, Heisterberg, and Oplev for having the courage to hack away so much of Larsson's blockbuster bestselling book. They understand the importance of realizing the story in cinematic fashion and they reshape the narrative in an imaginative manner.

But their commendable work is eventually undone when they stretch the narrative too thin to make an impression. As much as they try to exercise creative freedom, they are still living in Larsson's world. The narrative is packed with red herrings that are more irritating than engaging. It is difficult to become emotionally invested in the plot, because the story's heart is so achingly artificial. Temporarily ignoring so many other complaints that I have already addressed with Larsson's story, my main problem is simple: if I don't care about the characters, then I can't care about the mystery. Like the writers and the director, Rapace puts in a good effort, but it isn't enough. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was drowned in ink long before it reached the silver screen. In many ways, this movie never stood a chance.