A fascinating Swedish crime drama

MANILA, Philippines - Film review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Here’s a must-see movie that may still be showing in town and if so, I urge you to catch it: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish-made crime drama and murder-mystery-suspense thriller. It has all the ingredients of a meticulously-constructed puzzle. It is not as fast-paced and breathless as modern Hollywood detective movies; it even starts rather slowly, like a personal drama, but it soon picks up and one is enrapt by the unfolding drama and action.

A caveat: The film is in Swedish though it carries English subtitles. Moviegoers in general are averse to subtitles so that’s a major box-office obstacle. Moreover, the movie runs for two hours and 32 minutes, which is an eternity for viewers with short attention span. Contemporary moviegoers who will brave these “odds,” however, will be amply rewarded.

It is a hugely entertaining whodunit. The plot is intricate and there is always a bit of revelation to sustain one’s interest. More importantly, it has characters that are alive, active, constantly surprising, complex.

The two most important of these characters are a middle-aged magazine writer called Mikael Blomkvist who has just lost a libel case filed by a corrupt industrialist, and a young woman named Lisbeth Salander who may typically be described as “punk” which is just the tip of the iceberg. Her true profile is more substantial and complicated. Salander may be the title character but it is Blomkvist who has more “screen time” in this mystery drama.

From the start, the two are destined to meet — as pawns in a power play, then as partners in sleuthing, allies in life-and-death situations. They invariably get to have their bed scene though this comes much later.

The main plot begins when Blomkvist accepts an offer by the elderly patriarch of a wealthy clan that owns the Vanger Enterprises, for him to write the family history, which is really a cover for digging into the unsolved murder — or disappearance — of a family member in the mid-’60s. The missing relative is a comely 16-year-old girl named Harriet who may be one of several murders committed in the place the past several decades — half a century really. Compiling photographs and decoding notes dating back to the late ‘40s, Blomkvist reminds us of the hip photographer in Antonioni’s Blowup, who pieces photographic clues together and comes up with a big, intriguing picture.

Thanks to the girl Salander’s hacking skills and photographic memory and Blomkvist’s own determination and journalistic expertise, he is able to get more than what he bargained for, though not without paying a price at almost every turn. Salander herself has gone through her own hell but she’s a resilient, supersmart, even if troubled, soul, so for every setback the couple face, whether alone or in tandem, a crowd-pleaser follows. Must be the reason why the popularity of the movie’s literary source is going viral.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the first of a trilogy of novels called Millennium, by Stieg Larsson, a mystery writer who loved and devoured detective novels but who didn’t live to see the publication of his second and third completed stories, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. Two other works were reportedly in progress when he died in 2004. The trilogy was a bestseller first in the Scandinavian countries and then in Europe and ultimately, the world.

It is being remade in America, the same way Hollywood filmmakers redid Insomnia (originally a Norwegian thriller) with Christopher Nolan as director, and the gangster drama The Departed (originally Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong) with Martin Scorsese directing.

In the current Girl With Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish actor Mikael Nyqvist plays Blomkvist understatedly. In the coming Hollywood version, Daniel Craig takes over his role, with David Fincher holding the reins as director. Fincher made the acclaimed thriller-dramas Seven, The Fight Club, and Zodiac, and was recently at the forefront of the Oscar derby as nominated director of the critical and popular hit The Social Network. What Oscar statuettes Fincher failed to get this year he may finally win with the remake, assuming the new version will be a good one.

And one thing going for Fincher’s movie in progress is a subtheme of the plot — Nazism and the murderous treatment of Jews (a joke in Hollywood is that a Holocaust reference adds to every movie’s chances at the Oscars, for the unstated reason that many voters in the Academy are Jewish). On the other hand, the purists among the movie buffs may still opt for the original Girl With Dragon Tattoo as directed by Neils Arden Oplev, a tough act to follow.

For Oplev has managed to make a difficult, big, and decades-spanning story tight and engrossing. He depicts novelist Larsson’s other subthemes powerfully especially the violence against women and the abuse of the helpless among them. Yes, women are victims, but one tough cookie is able to fight back. That’s the character of Lisbeth Salander who appears again in the title roles of the two other novels. The fate of this young vixen in the movie’s closing shot suggests that the inevitable sequel is afoot.