Män som hatar kvinnor

Niels Arden Oplev (2009)

I’ve read somewhere that crime fiction has been enduringly popular because people can’t make sense of the real world but a good detective can solve mysteries and restore order.  I don’t know nearly enough about the genre to be able to say whether the recent television films based on Henning Mankell’s Wallander stories are typical of contemporary crime fiction – if they are, they seem to show a world that’s increasingly violent and unpredictable and murderers being tracked down not by a dispassionately brilliant sleuthing brain but by a combination of instinct, hard slog and accident.  What’s more, the process of finding out the truth always seems to involve Kurt Wallander and his colleagues in such personally gruelling experiences that their traumatic effect eclipses the solving of the crime.  Wallander not only operates in a godless universe but is himself lacking the godlike qualities of some of his literary and screen predecessors.   I expect this fall from grace applies to fictional detectives the world over although, as suggested in a BBC documentary on Henning Mankell, the frighteningly out of joint world that Wallander takes on may have a particular resonance in Sweden – a country which was a stranger to political assassinations until traumatised by the killings of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh.

The death of the writer Stieg Larsson might be the starting point of a Wallander investigation.  Larson was a left-wing political activist and journalist, the editor of a Trotskyist journal who also worked to expose the activities of far right and racist organisations in Sweden.   He died suddenly in 2004 at the age of fifty and, because he’d received death threats from his political enemies, there were suspicions of foul play, although in fact Larsson died of natural causes.  He left behind the manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels which became the phenomenally successfully ‘Millennium Trilogy’, of which The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first part.    The three novels have been adapted for cinema and filmed and are now being released serially.   (It’s striking they’ve been released in English-speaking countries months after their release not just in Scandinavia but in most of continental Europe).  The stories’ protagonists are Mikael Blomkvist, a big-name investigative journalist in his forties, and the twentysomething Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous ‘Girl’, a computer hacker who’s as resourceful as she’s sociopathic.   Niels Arden Oplev’s film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is impeccably, grimly modern.  Sally, who’s read the book, says that a number of its relatively warm and humane elements have been excised – and the Swedish title ‘Men Who Hate Women’ seems precisely appropriate compared with the more vaguely disquieting English one.  But a curious thing about this film is that has elements that make it seem a more old-fashioned and somewhat more comforting experience than Wallander on TV (Swedish or British versions).  The picture demonstrates, in an emotionally satisfying way, that the more evil runs rampant, the greater the relief you feel when justice is finally done.

Although I probably don’t watch them carefully enough, I get the impression from the Wallander stories that the villain is sometimes a diabolus ex machina.  That may well be intentional – making the point that the territory in which murders take place is more uncontrollably extensive than a country house or the Orient Express – but it deprives the audience of the traditional pleasure of trying to identify the culprit from early on.  What’s more, the crimes may eventually be explained without Wallander and his team seeming to have done much to bring that about.  It’s quite refreshing in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, co-produced by Yellow Bird Films (who make the Swedish TV Wallander) with Danish and Norwegian companies, that the explanation for the series of murders that eventually comes to light is linked to the group of characters in the frame from the start (even if that’s unsurprising since they’re mostly leading lights in the Swedish National Socialist Party).  It’s nice too that Mikael and Lisbeth (who has the handy gift of a photographic memory) receive clues and work things out from them.  The physical violence in this picture is thwacking and insistent and the material lacks the psychological richness to allay the suspicion that the violence is needed to make the prevailing gruesomeness dynamic.   Even so, it’s also a welcome contrast to much crime fiction on the television screen – Morse and adaptations of P D James included – that hardly any of the main characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although they may suffer ordeal and injury, is killed off.  (I have an abiding problem with whodunits set in a superficially real world in which people are disposed of with the same breezy heartlessness as in Agatha Christie.  I prefer Christie, whose murder stories are more reassuringly a game and whose pawns in the game are less likely to be confused with real human beings.)

When a book as widely read as this one is being made into a film, the adapters are at both an advantage (it’s a fair bet many people watching will have read the book and know what’s going on in spite of elisions) and a disadvantage (much of the audience is well placed to find fault with the adaptation).  As someone who hasn’t read the source material, I think Oplev and the screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg have done a good, workmanlike job with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.   Visually, the filmmaking isn’t particularly imaginative:  the Swedish landscape is stupendously, comfortlessly beautiful but there’s an awful lot of unsurprising (and lowering) greenish interiors.  In the early stages, Oplev gets information across simply by characters telling each other things – and accompanying these exchanges with visual aids like scribbled messages or photographs is hardly inventive.  Given the importance of Lisbeth’s IT skills, the shots of computer screens and fingers tapping on keyboards are disappointingly clichéd.  Yet the direction is tenaciously proficient – Oplev keeps the momentum going and the persistent use of old photographs and the attempts of Mikael and Lisbeth to work out the significance of the people in them become increasingly compelling.  There’s also a wonderful photograph of Harriet Vanger, whose unexplained disappearance as a sixteen-year-old four decades ago is the starting point for the investigation – and whose expression in the photo is Mona Lisa-ishly unreadable.  Mikael Blomqvist, who’s awaiting a three-month jail sentence after a corrupt industrialist has successfully sued him for libel, is hired by Harriet’s great uncle, Henrik Vanger, to try and solve the mystery of her vanishing.  (Henrik, the retired head of a family-owned group of companies, seems to be the only non-fascist among his siblings).

Brutal misogyny and the need for this to be spectacularly revenged form a recurring pattern in the story.  It’s reflected in Lisbeth’s relationship with her legal guardian (which provides the most garish sequences in the picture); in the revelation of what took place between Harriet and her father; in the flashbacks to Lisbeth’s own childhood and her reunion with her mother late on in the story.   While these episodes seem melodramatic, the naturalistic acting – the lack of histrionics – serves to make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more alarming:  you’re deprived of the security of theatricality.  (The film is certainly scary compared with the consciously stylish Shutter Island.)   Michael Nyqvist gives a patient, well-judged performance as Mikael Blomkvist – his ability to seem both interesting and ordinary enables Nyqvist to hold our attention and to act as the audience’s proxy.  I particularly liked the way in which his Blomkvist, in the early stages of his investigation, can show his interlocutors an affable face while making clear to us what he’s thinking.  The sense that the journalist is on a disorienting sabbatical is very well summed up in his palpable recovery of energy towards the end of the film when, having got to the bottom of the Harriet Vanger mystery and served his time in prison, a further intervention by Lisbeth enables Blomqvist to return to proving the corruption of the industrialist Wennerstrom.  Noomi Rapace is physically compelling and very effective in the role of Lisbeth although I wasn’t sure how much depth there was to her acting.   (Her husband is Ola Rapace, so good in the Swedish TV Wallander:  this must be an unusual example of an actress taking her husband’s name as her professional one.)   There’s good support from Sven-Bertil Taube (Henrik Langer), Marika Lagercrantz, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Bjorn Granath, Ewa Froling and, especially, Peter Haber.

20 March 2010