I’m often intrigued by murder mysteries and thrillers, even bad ones, because the whodunit elements and frequent dark material can stimulate me on multiple levels. It’s rare, however, those pieces coalesce into a story with something to say or a film that earns its mystery and suspense. Unfortunately, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the popular Swedish novel by Stieg Larsson which I have not read, doesn’t transcend those typical failings. It’s kind of a mess with muddled logic, low stakes and an infusion of superficial edginess.
The story begins with popular investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) being convicted of libel against a large corporation. It’s insinuated that he was set up, but that’s not very important. In six months’ time he’ll go to jail for a short while. This has little to do with the film except for forcing the character to resign from his magazine and suddenly find himself with six months of free time. That’s the perfect opportunity for an old business mogul, Henrik Vanger, to hire Blomkvist to investigate the apparent murder of his niece, Harriet, some 40 years ago. For various reasons, the likely culprit is a member of the Vanger family, which includes some former (?) Nazis. Coincidentally, Blomkvist had been babysat by Harriet as a child, which serves as a fairly obnoxious excuse for bad flashback glimpses of the two of them (in fact, all of the flashbacks are strangely but consistently poorly acted and blocked). Presumably these are meant to add some stakes to the investigation and humanize the victim, but they accomplish little on that front. They do contribute to a major clue late in the film, but this feels cheap as it’s so revealing but also so removed from 90% of the investigative work Blomkvist and the film put in.
Parallel to Blomkvist’s story is that of Lisbeth Salandan’s (Noomi Rapace). She’s an introverted hacker with a gothic asthetic who begins her strained involvement in the plot by checking out Blomkvist’s background for Henrik Vanger. She clears him as a reliable investigator who was probably set up, but for inexplicable reasons she continues to keep tabs on him even after the job is over. There is never any logical reason behind this besides being a necessary plot point to get the two characters together. Eventually her personal story and the main mystery will share thematic similarities, but the impetus for her getting involved doesn’t make a lick of sense. For that matter, I’m not sure she belongs in the movie at all. She’s often just a walking plot point with her set of skills turning up copious amounts of evidence and relative material whenever needed or to otherwise bail out Blomkvist from any challenge sent his way.
Lisbeth, despite being 24 years old, is required to have a legal guardian as a result of some previous issues. As the movie begins, her guardian has croaked and she’s assigned to another, who turns out to be a twisted sexual predator. He leverages his control over her limited freedom and finances in order to gain sexual favors, and later force violent sexual acts. This plot ends up resembling a much more graphic and disturbing version of Hard Candy, where the victim ultimately gains control of the situation and has her own form of revenge, in this case violent sodomy and blackmail. I’ll take this moment to point out that an earlier scene involved her being assaulted by a group of young men in a subway station and that the main murder mystery also involves sexual violence. We also learn that Lisbeth’s family was abusive to her mother. The Swedish title for the novel and movie Men Who Hate Women. It’s not clear, however, what this all adds up to. Is the movie trying to say something about males in Sweden? Hard to say considering the film has no shortage of positive male characters. There’s a pattern of Lisbeth punishing the story’s predators with sexual violence and/or death, but there’s no attempt to really justify this policy. In one case it’s somewhat understandable and in another it’s obscenely over-the-top and sick. To a certain extent, all of this sexual violence comes off superficially edgy, controversial and titillating instead of helping construct an interesting character. It feels quite exploitative. Lisbeth is pretty impenetrable, an almost immaturely quiet and closed off presence to both the other characters and to the audience. Maybe the two sequels are needed to give her substance, but here there’s little to define her outside of the sexual violence enacted upon and enacted by her. This results in a whole lot of wasted screentime.
Anyway, Lisbeth keeps remotely looking at Blomkvisk’s computer to check his status on the investigation, and eventually can’t resist piecing some clues together for him. Soon enough, they’ve met and are working together for the second half of the film. The basic murder mystery elements get a little clumsy here, with Blomkvist becoming thick and slow-witted in order to allow certain plot points to happen. For a supposed nationally famous investigative journalist, it’s disappointing when he’s often slower than the audience. At the same time, some important clues found in Harriet’s belongings lead to a much bigger mystery, but it never really makes any sense how or why Harriet figured any of it out in the first place. A couple brief action scenes are really awkwardly edited, for reasons that I believe to involve the gaps in diegetic time between shots and what the editing and shot types are telling us. The latter indicates to me that I’m watching an unbroken progression of time, but the former produces a weird effect of these scenes being rushed through. That was my impression anyhow. It’s difficult to keep track of the large extended Vanger family that the investigation involves, along with a variety of other small undeveloped plot tidbits thrown in, which is possibly a cause of the adaptation process.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fails because it has no apparent philosophy. It’s not saying anything, at least not cohesively. There are several abusive, sexually violent men in this film, but there’s nothing concretely stated about these circumstances, nothing linking these predilections to a larger point. Lisbeth’s own personal story has real impact on the primary mystery, nor does Blomkvisk’s libel case, which comes back into play for an extended epilogue. The mystery of Harriet’s disappearance, which is the meat of the plot, is just a diversion from other poorly and shortly developed subplots for Blomkvisk and Lisbeth. They have no stakes in what they’re doing, and thus I don’t particularly care beyond a love of mysteries and puzzles. Unfortunately, even that element proves a mess with pieces that don’t completely fit together. It’s a mess of a mystery thriller spiced up with disturbing yet meaningless violence.
* Buy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from Amazon.com
