Movie Review: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo": A-. This movie is the American remake of the Swedish hit of the same title from 2009. (The Swedish film was not released in the US until 2010.) Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), an investigative reporter, writes an article for Millennium Magazine in Stockholm accusing a business tycoon, Hans Wennerstrom, of corruption. Unfortunately for Blomkvist, the evidence for his article was only circumstantial, and Wennerstrom wins a big libel suit against him. A despondent Blomkvist walks back from the courthouse to the magazine's office and tells his boss/lover that he is turning in his typewriter. Within a matter of hours, Blomkvist is approached by a lawyer representing Henrik Vanger, an elder statesman from the famous industrialist Vanger family, to ascertain his interest in doing a special research project. Blomkvist takes a train four hours north of the city into the remote town of Hedestad to learn more about the project from Henrik (the always cool Christopher Plummer). Henrik and most of the other Vanger family elders live on a large forested island in the river which flows through town.

Why does Henrik want to hire Blomkvist after Blomkvist has just suffered the national embarrassment of losing his well-publicized legal battle with Wennerstrom? We find out that Henrik, through his attorney, hired a private eye firm to check on Blomkvist to determine whether he was the right man for the job. The investigator who did the work was a mysterious young woman named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), complete with spiked hair, piercings all over her body, a no-nonsense aura, and most importantly, the ability to hack into any computer known to man. Even before Blomkvist has boarded the train to Hedestad, Lisbeth, and therefore Henrik, knows everything there is to know about Blomkvist. He is, indeed, the right man for the job.

Unbeknownst to other Vanger family members, the "job" Henrik asks Blomkvist to undertake is simply to find out who killed his beloved niece, Harriet, some forty years ago. Her body was never discovered, even though the case was thoroughly investigated at the time by the local police. Talk about a cold case! Henrik suspects it was a fellow family member, or at least someone on the island that day, because the bridge crossing the river into town was barricaded due to a massive trucking accident. There was, and still is, no other way off the island!

Henrik finally convinces Blomkvist to take the case, telling him that part of Blomkvist's compensation will be "getting the real dirt" on Wennerstrom, dirt which Blomkvist never had available to him during the trial. Blomkvist takes up residence in an island cottage, and digs into the boxes of case-related documents which Henrik has gathered in his futile effort to find Harriet's killer. Meanwhile, Lisbeth has her own personal tragedies to deal with. Blomkvist and Lisbeth's paths eventually cross again, and when they do the action really heats up in more ways than one.

This is an excellent movie for many reasons, as was the original. I read somewhere that Lisbeth Salander will go down in literary and cinema history as one of the great detective heroines of all time. Whether true or not, I would not want to mess with her. In the original film, European actor Michael Nyqvist played Blomkvist as kind of an everyman, perhaps because Nyqvist in real life looks like an atypical movie star. By contrast, Daniel Craig's film roles have included a couple of stints as James Bond. The mystique of an island in the far reaches of northern Sweden, especially during the winter season, was awesome. (The movie poster reads, "What is hidden in the snow comes forth in the thaw.") There is also a creepy tie-in between the Vangers and the Nazis. Among the dozens of clues pursued by Blomqvist and Lisbeth, my favorite is the series of photographs taken earlier on the day of Harriet's disappearance forty years ago. The photos show her watching a parade in Hedestad, when suddenly her eyes catch a glimpse of something that rattles her. If Blomqvist and Lisbeth can figure out what she saw, perhaps the case will be solved.

I feel somewhat guilty giving this movie an A- instead of an A. There are many Vanger family members, and some of them are seen and discussed both in the present-day and at the time of Harriet's disappearance when they obviously looked different. Some of the dialogue is obscured by thick accents. To get the most out of this movie, you need to be wide awake and alert. You have to exert some effort as a viewer. It is hard to bestow an A to a movie that had me scratching my head sometimes, notwithstanding my noble efforts to keep track of everything. Maybe the shortfall was mine, but I'm sticking with the A-.