Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs. The animating force in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy — incarnated on screen first by Noomi Rapace and now, in David Fincher’s adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” by Rooney Mara — Lisbeth is an outlaw feminist fantasy-heroine, and also an avatar of digital antiauthoritarianism.
Her appeal arises from a combination of vulnerability and ruthless competence. Lisbeth can hack any machine, crack any code and, when necessary, mete out righteous punitive violence, but she is also (to an extent fully revealed in subsequent episodes) a lost and abused child. And Ms. Mara captures her volatile and fascinating essence beautifully. Hurt, fury and calculation play on her pierced and shadowed face. The black bangs across her forehead are as sharp and severe as an obsidian blade, but her eyebrows are as downy and pale as a baby’s. Lisbeth inspires fear and awe and also — on the part of Larsson and his fictional alter ego, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played in Mr. Fincher’s film by Daniel Craig) — a measure of chivalrous protectiveness.
She is a marvelous pop-culture character, stranger and more complex than the average superhero and more intriguing than the usual boy wizards and vampire brides. It has been her fate, unfortunately, to make her furious, inspiring way through a series of plodding and ungainly stories.
The Swedish screen version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” directed by Niels Arden Oplev, often felt like the very long pilot episode of a television crime show, partly because of Larsson’s heavy-footed clumsiness as a storyteller. Despite the slick intensity of Mr. Fincher’s style, his movie is not immune to the same lumbering proceduralism. There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching “Cold Case” or “Criminal Minds,” but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques. Hold your breath, it’s a time for a high-speed Internet search! Listen closely, because the chief bad guy is about to explain everything right before he kills you!
It must be said that Mr. Fincher and the screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, manage to hold on to the vivid and passionate essence of the book while remaining true enough to its busy plot to prevent literal-minded readers from rioting. (There are a few significant changes, but these show only how arbitrary some of Larsson’s narrative contrivances were in the first place.) Using harsh and spooky soundtrack music (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) to unnerving and powerful effect, Mr. Fincher creates a persuasive ambience of political menace and moral despair.
He has always excelled at evoking invisible, nonspecific terrors lurking just beyond the realm of the visible. The San Francisco of “Zodiac” was haunted not so much by an elusive serial killer as by a spectral principle of violence that was everywhere and nowhere, a sign of the times and an element of the climate. And the Harvard of “The Social Network,” with its darkened wood and moody brick, seemed less a preserve of gentlemen and scholars than a seething hive of paranoia and alienation.
Mr. Fincher honors Larsson’s muckraking legacy by envisioning a Sweden that is corrupt not merely in its ruling institutions but in the depths of its soul. Lisbeth and Mikael — whose first meeting comes around the midpoint of the movie’s 158-minutes — swim in a sea of rottenness. They are not quite the only decent people in the country, but their enemies are so numerous, so powerful and so deeply entrenched that the odds of defeating them seem overwhelming.
Mikael, his career in ruins and his gadfly magazine in jeopardy after a libel judgment, is hired by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), to investigate a decades-old crime. Dysfunction would be a step up for the Vanger clan, who live on a secluded island and whose family tree includes Nazis, rapists, alcoholics, murderers and also, just to prevent you from getting the wrong impression, Stellan Skarsgard, the very epitome of Nordic nastiness.
The Vangers are monstrous, with a few exceptions, but far from anomalous. The gruesome pattern of criminality that Lisbeth and Mikael uncover is a manifestation of general evil that spreads throughout the upper echelons of the nation’s economy and government. The bad apples in that family are just one face of a cruel, misogynist ruling order that also includes Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), the sadistic state bureaucrat who is Lisbeth’s legal guardian. And everywhere she and Mikael turn there are more bullying, unprincipled and abusive men.
Sexual violence is a lurid thread running through “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and Mr. Fincher approaches it with queasy, teasing sensationalism. Lisbeth’s dealings with Bjurman include a vicious rape and a correspondingly brutal act of revenge, and there is something prurient and salacious about the way the initial assault is filmed. The vengeance, while graphic, is visually more circumspect.
And when Mikael and Lisbeth interrupt their sleuthing for a bit of nonviolent sex, we see all of Ms. Mara and quite a bit less of Mr. Craig, whose naked torso is by now an eyeful of old news. This disparity is perfectly conventional — the exploitation of female nudity is an axiom of modern cinema — but it also represents a failure of nerve and a betrayal of the sexual egalitarianism Lisbeth Salander argues for and represents.
Still, it is her movie, and Ms. Mara’s. Mr. Craig is an obliging sidekick, and the other supporting actors (notably Robin Wright as Mikael’s colleague and paramour and Donald Sumpter as a helpful detective) perform with professionalism and conviction. Mr. Fincher’s impressive skill is evident, even as his ambitions seem to be checked by the limitations of the source material and the imperatives of commercial entertainment.
There is too much data and not enough insight, and local puzzles that get in the way of larger mysteries. The story starts to fade as soon as the end credits run. But it is much harder to shake the lingering, troubling memory of an angry, elusive and curiously magnetic young woman who belongs so completely to this cynical, cybernetic and chaotic world without ever seeming to be at home in it.
“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, sexual violence.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Opens on Tuesday nationwide.
Directed by David Fincher; written by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production design by Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Trish Summerville; produced by Scott Rudin, Ole Sondberg, Soren Staermose and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.
WITH: Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgard (Martin Vanger), Steven Berkoff (Frode), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), Yorick van Wageningen (Bjurman), Joely Richardson (Anita Vanger), Geraldine James (Cecilia), Goran Visnjic (Armansky), Donald Sumpter (Detective Morell) and Ulf Friberg (Wennerstrom).
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