The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (3/5 Stars)

Rooney Mara does not look like Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is small, skinny, and sharp. Rooney is of average height, healthy, and round all over. She lost weight for this role and somehow managed to pinch in her cheeks a little but it is not enough. Rooney is a doe-eyed babyface. Lisbeth is not. There is no getting around it.

It is hard to say why this matters so much. For some reason I am thinking of something obscure that I saw in the special features of a completely different movie. It was in “Three Kings” a movie about the first Iraq War. One of the Iraqis (Said Taghmaoui, I just looked up his name on IMDb) that played a bad guy was speaking of meeting the actor Ice Cube for the first time and how he could tell that he came from a rough neighborhood (Compton to be exact). He said he could tell by the eyes. People who have grown up in a rough neighborhood have it ingrained around their eyes. He knew that because he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Iraq. And then he said Ice Cube knew that simply by looking at him as well. Ever since I heard that I became much more interested in eyes. Does being witness to rough things over a period of time really leave its mark on the eyes? I don’t know honestly, but as a person who watches many movies I will say that there is something about the eyes that can create a certain seriousness or desperation in a character, which incidentally can convey a history of seeing rough things. Good examples are Viggo Mortenson in “Eastern Promises,” and Charlize Theron in “Monster.” And perhaps the best example is Noomi Rapace’s take on Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Those eyes were piercing. Rooney Mara’s are not. The role has been miscast. Rooney would make more sense as a Disney princess.

This is a pity because this movie is technically better than the Swedish version. We have none other than David Fincher, one of the best American directors, at the helm here. Fincher has excelled at serial killers (Seven) and has excelled at complex subjects (The Social Network), sometimes both at the same time (Zodiac). The convoluted 40-year-old murder mystery that is the centerpiece of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo,” is a ready made plot for the likes of Fincher. If you have a story that requires a journalist to do a realistic investigation (i.e. painstakingly go over evidence, hit the books at the library), Fincher is the guy who can make it interesting, lend it humor, and give it momentum. Here the disgraced journalist Michael Blomvist (played by Daniel Craig) is hired to solve a family mystery that involves a close-knit family with Nazi connections. The mystery is intricate to the highest degree but Fincher’s clear direction shines through it. In fact, for the first half of the movie where the mystery plotline runs parallel and separate to the introduction of Lisbeth Salander, it is the more interesting plot to watch unfold. In the Swedish version it was the other way around. Now if only we could insert Noomi Rapace into the American version.

Not that all of Fincher’s choices seem to be entirely correct. There was something wrong with this movie that was hard to put my finger on while I was watching it. So I went back and rewatched several scenes from the original version. The plot is exactly the same of course. What is different may be as little as tweaked dialogue, different camera angles, or simply physical gestures. But it is unmistakable how the movies have different impacts precisely where it is most important: how it regards Lisbeth Salander. This is touchy subject because there are two scenes of sexual assault in the story, one being a rape. Now I suppose I could be like the MPAA and basically judge the difference between the two versions by how many seconds of nakedness were shown in each. (There is far more in the American version. It actually surprised me upon a second viewing how little is actually shown in the Swedish version. Only about a half-second. The rest is all inferred. Both distort and mute the screaming after awhile, a rather merciful thing to do for an audience.) But the more important differences take place before and after the rape.  The rapist is Lisbeth’s legal guardian, newly appointed after her old guardian had a stroke. The sexual assaults start as a form of extortion. Lisbeth won’t have access to her own money until complying. Now, in the Swedish version it only takes one meeting before the first sexual assault. In the American version, it takes a back-story and two meetings to get around to it. It seems as though the American version is trying to ease us into the sexual assault. A pointless exercise in futility it would seem to me. The biggest difference though is that the American version also adds scenes right after the assaults where Lisbeth dresses herself, goes into the next room where the rapist is waiting to give her check, takes it and leaves. The Swedish version simply cut from the assault to Lisbeth washing out her mouth and painfully walking home respectively. What is the point of these extra scenes? At my least cynical moment I will assume that the makers were attempting to make the rapist look pathetic (in the movie he seems a bit frightened and apologetic after the assault). But even so, who gives a shit? What does it matter how the rapist feels about what he has done? It is enough that the actions exist as they do in the world. Time to move onto the next scene. 

There are some styles and genres of movies where it is okay to objectify women (or rather people in general). I wrote about this in some length when I defended “Sucker Punch,” a comic book movie that came out earlier this year. But when the original title of the book the movie is from is called, “Men who Hate Women,” I think we have entered territory where any objectification at all should be barred entirely. Take a look at the movie poster above, which shows a topless Lisbeth Salandar. Is it really appropriate for the marketers of a movie about one of the most powerful symbols of sexual violence to sell their movie with the promise of sex? (You may also ask what exactly the poster means by “Evil shall with evil be expelled.” Are they insinuating that Blomvist and Salandar are evil or using evil? How so?) The Swedish version at least seemed to understand that sexual abuse is not such an easy thing to get over. The way Noomi Rapace played the character in the consensual sex scenes, and there a couple of those, was for lack of a better word, tragic. She could go through the motions but was incapable of intimacy. That makes sense considering the character’s history. The way Rooney Mara interacts with Daniel Craig in the American version would work much better in a James Bond flick. Rooney Mara would not make a bad Bond girl.

For the record, I still don’t fully understand how the epilogue heist worked in either version of this movie. Perhaps if I read the book.