The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher's film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo should please fans of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Fincher and his screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, remain faithful to the complicated plot of the trilogy's first book, and they reproduce most of its many characters. In truth they improve vastly on their source material.
Larsson's story chronicles the alliance of a disgraced Stockholm editor named Mikael Blomkvist and an antisocial young hacker named Lisbeth Salander, who set out to solve the decades-old disappearance of a young heiress and to track down a misogynistic serial killer. The book is ingeniously plotted, but it has the chilly purposefulness of a certain brand of modern detective fiction, and it lingers distastefully on the particulars of murder and rape. (The second and third installments provide the narrative cleverness and the escalating suspense without the clinical violence.)
The glum 2009 Swedish movie version doesn't correct the book's excesses, and its acting is mediocre. But Fincher's high-gloss remake, beautifully designed by Donald Graham Burt and lit by Jeff Cronenweth, manages to be breathlessly exciting without sacrificing empathy. The rape scene is horrifying, but that's because Fincher's focus is on the emotions of the victim, not on the gruesome details.
