I recall a cartoon of two people leaving a movie theater where one of Cecil B. DeMille's Biblical spectaculars was showing. The caption has one person blithely assuring the other, "The book was better."
Dropping that remark is a privilege I've mostly been denied; much more often, if I do read the book it's after having seen the movie. I did recently make my way through the nearly 600 pages of Stieg Larsson's novel "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," the first entry in the informally designated "Millennium trilogy." The three novels, published following the activist journalist's untimely death in 2004 (age 50), swiftly became an international phenomenon. I found the book a good deal more satisfying read than the film is a, er, watch. Yet I have to report that my companion, who hadn't read the book, was engrossed by the movie and expressed pleasure that it "told a real story for a change."
Even at a length of 152 minutes, the story in the movie is a radically streamlined version of the one(s) in the book. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a "watchdog journalist" (not unlike Larsson himself) who has just been found guilty of libeling a powerful magnate, elects to lie low while awaiting the start of his token prison term. His withdrawal from the urban Stockholm scene coincides with an offer from an aged billionaire: Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) wants him to come to his remote island estate and investigate the disappearance of a beloved niece, Harriet - which happened 40 years ago and has obsessed Vanger ever since.
Although Blomkvist doesn't realize it, the expedition will be a trip into his own past: his father once worked for Vanger on the island, and when young Mikael visited him there, Harriet was his babysitter. The disappearance occurred some time afterward, on a day when the island was cut off from the mainland by a bridge accident. There seems little room for doubt that Harriet was done away with by a member of her family, as poisonous a collection of monsters as ever swarmed within one genealogy.
Initially resistant, Blomkvist is soon caught up in his employer's obsession. But he needs help to pore over a wealth of data, and finds it in a most unorthodox way: he cyber-ambushes the hacker who'd built a dossier on him at the request of Vanger's lawyer. This encyclopedically resourceful creature is our girl with the dragon tattoo - also nose and eyebrow rings, black goth glower and bone-deep antisocial ferocity - Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace).
Salander, as she is invariably referred to in the book, is Larsson's most distinctive creation, and worthy of becoming the title character. Both the international best-selling novel and the 2009 Swedish film originally were called "Men Who Hate Women." That title makes sense, certainly, but it's didactic, clinically signposting an accumulation of statistics, psychological detail, plot points and grisly tableaux that are more powerful if allowed to emerge from the texture of a crackerjack detective story - something with a nifty paperback name like, say, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
I'm glad my fellow filmgoer (OK, my wife) found the movie gripping, and I wouldn't want to discourage any adult from seeing it. Stress adult: there's a lot of tough material here, in terms of both sex and violence, and none of it is euphemized.
Still, I have to say I missed the wonderful experience of ... I think the word is steeping. The book is long in terms of time and distance as well as number of pages. Its myriad events cover nearly a year and take the reader to so many places - not only far-flung locations in the Nordic backcountry and several foreign lands, but specific settings on Hedeby Island and in the nearby town that accrete both atmosphere and psychological significance. Understandably, many characters have been jettisoned or combined.
But the most diminishing aspect of the film adaptation is that everything happens too fast, comes too easily. Blomkvist, and then Blomkvist-and-Salander, don't spend months immersed in the evidentiary minutiae of four decades before the key truths stare back at them; it's pretty much a matter of one or the other swooping down on each key discovery, almost as fast as clicking a mouse. The result, while coherent, doesn't feel lived-in, lived-through.
Denied the breathing room and complex personal histories supplied their characters in the novel, Nyqvist and Rapace both acquit themselves admirably. Neither Blomkvist nor Nyqvist partakes of the swashbuckling aura customarily extended to journalist-detectives on screen, and that's refreshing. Rapace fixes the viewer's attention like a wasp in a closed room, though she only hints at the rage and embattled singularity of the character in the book. The direction by Niels Arden Opley is undistinguished but adequate, a "Mystery Theater" kind of competence that stays out of story's way but also brings little to the party.
In this case, story no longer includes the complicated business of the commentary magazine Blomkvist co-publishes, or his longtime erotic relationship with his married co-publisher Erika Berger. This means that Lena Endre, although prominently billed, only winks in and out of a couple scenes in the movie; a pity, since the actress was so memorable in the Liv Ullmann-directed, Ingmar Bergman-scripted "Faithless" about a decade ago. Another august figure from Bergman land, Gunnel Lindblom, can be seen briefly as the mother of the long-vanished Harriet.
[[In-content Ad]]
