David Fincher (2011)

The running time (158 minutes) is remarkably close to that of the Swedish film made two years ago (152 minutes).  What’s more remarkable, and disappointing, is that David Fincher’s version feels much longer.   Scene by scene, it’s fast-moving and often dynamic but, as a whole, it’s protracted.  A year on from The Social Network, the dramatic concision of that film seems once again anomalous in Fincher’s larger body of work.   As you’d expect, this Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is sharply edited (by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall); the sound design is sophisticated and the score (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) an important and effective part of what you hear.  There’s the odd brief sequence that makes you smile because it’s so swift and precise – like the one in which Lisbeth Salander has her laptop stolen as she’s about to board an underground train, recovers the computer in a spectacular struggle on the station escalators, and gets back on the train just as the doors are closing.  The monochrome opening titles sequence is intriguing too but it’s apt that, according to the film’s Wikipedia entry, it was this sequence rather than any part of the film proper that was nominated by the St Louis Gateway Film Critics Association as the ‘Best Scene’ in a film of 2011!

Production began after Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 version had become a big international hit and Fincher must have felt under commercial pressure to up the ante.  Stieg Larsson’s novel’s reputation as a world-beating page-turner is unassailable:  Fincher and the screenwriter Steven Zaillian seem to have assumed their adaptation would inevitably be compelling too – and it’s not unlikely that huge numbers of people who’ve read the book will go to see this film and think well of it because what they see on screen is enough to evoke the excitement they felt reading Larsson.  Yet, in spite of all the technical skill in evidence, the narrative tempo is sluggish and the story feels misshapen.  Lisbeth Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist are leading parallel lives for what seems an age before they team up.  Solving the mystery of Harriet Vanger’s disappearance is the motor of the film but, after the mystery’s been solved, Fincher devotes a good twenty minutes to a coda in which the corrupt tycoon who, at the start, successfully prosecuted Blomkvist and his magazine for libel gets his comeuppance.  Gruesome highlights like the anal rape of Salander by her guardian lawyer, her revenge on this sexual sadist and Martin Vanger’s attempt to suffocate Blomkvist all go on for longer than is good for them.  These sequences also illustrate Fincher’s tendency to make the Nordic material somewhat ‘exotic’.  The characters’ various perversions aren’t worked up in a crude way but they’re worked up nevertheless.

It’s in keeping with this tendency that Rooney Mara’s look as Lisbeth Salander is very  designed.  After a while, I realised who she kept reminding me of – a black-haired, dark-eyed version of the Edith Scob character in Eyes Without a Face.  Mara made a strong impression in her short appearance in The Social Network and it’s not surprising that her portrait of Salander is being praised:  it’s more nuanced than Noomi Rapace’s performance in the Oplev film even if Mara occasionally seems to be anxious to take the lid off Salander’s emotions.  (Fincher rewards her for her patience in the oddly sentimental closing scenes.)   As Blomkvist, Daniel Craig is crisp and proficient but impersonal – it’s as if he thought, playing a Swede, he shouldn’t give too much away.  He’s not the only one who appears to have been cast for his Aryan colouring:  Robin Wright is beautiful but inexpressive as Blomkvist’s partner Erika Berger.  In the role of Henrik Vanger, Christopher Plummer’s humour is very welcome.  Plummer is easily authoritative and good at suggesting that Henrik’s smiles and wit are a sticking plaster on an open wound.   As Martin Vanger, Stellan Skarsgård rather gives the game away with the snarly grin with which he greets Blomvkist on their first meeting but he settles down to give a good account of himself.  So too do the likes of Steven Berkoff, Joely Richardson, Embeth Davidtz and Goran Visnjic.

30 December 2011