In the movies, most male computer hackers are nerds — some are pale and overweight, some are skinny and full of smartass comments, but none of them are what you’d call sexually charismatic. But for some reason, female computer hackers — on the rare occasions that we encounter them — are super-hot and unobtainably cool, often favouring tight black t-shirts, jeans clinging to their lithe frames, combat boots, and multiple piercings, as if they live in cyberspace rather than merely manipulate it. In other words, they tend to resemble Angelina Jolie in Hackers, or Noomi Rapace in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — the mind of a cryptologist in the body of that woman from La La La Human Steps.The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was, of course, adapted from the first volume in the trilogy of bestselling crime novels by the late Stieg Larsson, and I wonder if part of the book’s appeal is the way Larsson successfully introduces this outlandish Lisbeth character — survivor of abuse, twentysomething computer prodigy, spike-collared punk fashion avatar, badass angel of vengeance, an eye-catching assemblage of pierced lips, tattooed back, and rippling abs — into a real-world setting where a more traditional mystery story is taking place, one involving a corrupt, wealthy family, a missing girl, and lots of time spent poring over dusty old newspapers in the stacks of the local library. It’s a book that feels old-fashioned and cutting-edge at the same time — you could see Sidney Lumet making this movie, but you can also imagine the material appealing to someone like David Fincher.
In fact, the film was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, a Danish director whose previous work in film and television I am not familiar with. (Supposedly American versions of the Larsson books are in the works, but so far no director has been officially hired.) With its classical widescreen framing, subdued colour palette, and subtle air of paranoia, Oplev’s direction suggests a Scandinavian version of Alan J. Pakula — an ideal choice. The film runs nearly 150 minutes, but except for the somewhat protracted tying up of loose ends that occupies its final half hour, it hums along at just the right pace, deliberately but confidently. As complicated as the family tree at the centre of the story may be, you never feel as though the filmmakers are racing to cram five hours of story into half that running time. Just about the only place in the film where I sensed Oplev trying for a joke was the scene where we get the first glimpse of the wall where the hero, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), has created a diagram of how all the suspects in the case he’s investigating relate to each other — “Don’t worry,” Oplev seems to be telling us, “the hero can’t wrap his head around all this data either!”
It doesn’t help Blomkvist that the crime he’s looking into took place 40 years ago, and many of the faces on that wall belong to people who are now long dead. He’s been hired by wealthy Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger to see what he can learn about the disappearance (and presumed murder) of his niece Margaret back in the mid-’60s. Aided by Lisbeth, Blomkvist links Margaret to a series of unsolved ritualistic murders in the area stretching back to the ’40s and apparently inspired by Bible verses. The Vangers’ sinister family history also looms large over the case — at least two of Henrik’s brothers were Nazis, and there’s a mysterious drowning death that anyone who’s ever watched a mystery before will suspect figures into the whole jigsaw puzzle too somehow.
And like all the other pieces that make up The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, it locks into place with a satisfying snap. Maybe there’s nothing terribly deep about the screenplay or flashy about the filmmaking (although a nicely edited sequence in which Blomkvist uses a bunch of old photos to make an “animated” film of Margaret’s last moments of freedom holds its own against a similar scene from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out), but it’s a well-made thriller whose plot actually hangs together and treats you like a grown-up, and these days, that certainly counts for something.
Indeed, I wonder whether an American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will actually get made. This is precisely the kind of expensive-to-make, older-skewing, effects-light genre picture — I’m thinking of seemingly highly commercial movies like State of Play and Duplicity — that cost the studios so much cash last year. And also, who will they possibly get to play Lisbeth? I’d love to see Asia Argento get the part, but something tells me it’s likelier to go to someone like Ellen Page, and the image of Ellen Page talking tough with rings through her nose and a cigarette between her lips is outlandish in all the wrong ways.
0 Yorumlar