Directed bySwedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev from a best-selling mystery novel by hiscountryman, Stieg Larsson, The Girl Withthe Dragon Tattoo is a subtitled thriller with an anxiety about the tyrannyof the powerful, especially of men over women. Although the film clocks in atmore than two and a half hours, it never drags or feels long or overstuffed.The mystery at the heart of the plot seems a bit convoluted in the end, but theride is swift and well upholstered, shocking scenes of sexual cruelty and all.
Although theprotagonist seems to be Mikael Blomkvist, a Swedish Bob Woodward framed in alibel case by a corrupt industrialist and facing a short term in Sweden’s Motel6-like prison system, the real star is the eponymous tattooed girl. Lisbeth isa severe Goth with jet-black hair and multiple piercings, a 21st-century IrmaVep on a motorcycle. When old Henrik Vanger hires Blomkvist to investigate the1960s-era disappearance of Harriet, Lisbeth becomes the reporter’s shadow,hacking into his work files and avidly following his leads. Finally, they makecontact and become partners in unlocking a mystery hidden in the deep closet ofa family with many secrets.
Blomkvist’s storyis straightforward enougha successful middle-aged media figure with a divorcebehind him. Lisbeth, however, is an enigma gradually unpeeleda 24-year oldprivate investigator with a criminal record. When her new probation officer,who has legal guardianship over her finances, forces her to exchange degradingsex acts for access to her own money, she becomes the avenging fury in black.In the age of mini-cameras, anything can be recorded and circulated.
Her interest inBlomkvist’s investigation is tied to her own pattern of abuse at the hands ofmen with squalid values. Harriet might have been raped and murdered by someonein her own family. So believes Henrik, apparently the only honorable member ofa family that supported Sweden’stiny Nazi Party in the 1930s. The Vangers are, he confesses, a greedy,worthless clan of the small-minded and power-mad. Naturally, someone isdetermined to thwart reopening Harriet’s case by any means.
Filmed in themelancholy shades of a pale Swedish twilight, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a suspenseful murder-mystery interritory similar to Kenneth Branagh’s television mini-series “Wallander,”based on the detective novels by Sweden’s Henning Mankell. It’s astory of men whose lust for power knows no moral limits and an argument on thenature of evil. Blomkvist, the aging liberal, thinks evil behavior results frombad nurturing. The streetwise Lisbeth believes it’s a choice made freely.
