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The Appropriate Tune: 'No Rest For the Wicked' by Lykke Li
The 00’s have been the Golden Age of films based on books. From Harry Potter to Twilight, Hunger Games to the DaVinci Code, film adaptations were enjoying the most success they’d seen since the dawn of Hollywood. Millions, if not billions of dollars pouring into the box office, and studios were riding high on the hog, ready to exploit this cash cow as long as it kept giving milk. There was an amount of backlash of course, mostly from terminally online dudes desperate for the world to know they don’t like these movies made for women and children, but nothing that could really curb the momentum.at the time. It was a YA world, and we were all just living in it.
The Millennium Trilogy slides right into the ‘also-ran’ category of this boom period. I can remember the buzz around the books when I was younger, I can remember seeing previews for the movie adaptation starring Daniel Craig, but then things just fizzled out. Stieg Larsson, the author of the books had died before the books had even released, so there was always going to be a hard limit to how far studios could ride this gravy train, but after the initial buzz wore off it seemed like America was utterly uninterested in anything Swedish that wasn’t related to meatballs or Abba. That’s how it was for me, a collection of weird titles and covers languishing in the back of my memory like a rusty car frame in the backyard, so when I decided on the theme for this year’s Marathon I figured that October was a good time to do some spring cleaning. Mentally speaking, I’m still a very messy person.
Released in 2009, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, and produced by Soren Staermose through Yellow Bird, ZDF Enterprise and others, based on the novel of the same name by Stieg Larsson. Michael Nyqvist stars as Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine whose career is in limbo after being set up to lose a libel case against a local corrupt capitalist. With only a hefty fine and some jail time to look forward to, Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, member of the Vanger Group. Vanger is looking to hire Blomkvist to find out who murdered his niece Harriet, who disappeared from the family manor some 40 odd years ago, and with nothing better to do with his time Blomkvist agrees. However Mikael can’t do it alone, and luckily he won’t have to, after a meeting with the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a professional hacker with a penchant for investigation and a chip on her shoulder. Together they will dig into the history of the Vanger family in the hope of finding Harriet’s killer, but when you’re as rich a family as the Vangers you’re bound to have more than one skeleton in their closet.
A rich family with a dark secret is a plot line that stretches back to Gothic fiction, but Dragon Tattoo does attempt some things to set it apart from the rest of the pack. There’s our female lead Lisbeth for example, the bisexual punk rocker girl with a mysterious past who’s also a professional hacker, which sounds like some Mary Sue stuff but doesn’t really come across that way in the story. Then there’s all the rape, which I’m sure was meant to make things feel ‘real’ and edgy, but I could have done without it.
I also could have gone without this movie being 2 and a half hours long. Of course when you’ve got a mystery story you want to drip feed information, but everything has a limit. Lisbeth practically has a movie all her own before she even links up with the main plot, and when the mystery is all but solved it still takes an hour to actually wrap things up. Really the movie isn’t bad but it runs on for so long it ended up killing my motivation to write about it.
I also can’t help but question the motives behind the story. While Lisbeth would go on to become more prominent across the trilogy, it does seem a little telling that Larsson, a journalist and activist, would make the main character of his book a super successful journalist and activist who all the ladies fall for, even women half his age. Which I mean okay, there’s nothing wrong with a little wish fulfillment, but it probably would have been better to do it in a story that didn’t include multiple rape scenes. Look at James Bond for example, power fantasies out the ass with nary a rape scene in sight.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gets a mild recommendation. If one can maintain their concentration throughout then I imagine the film being appealing to anyone who is a fan of Seven, Zodiac or any of those epic 21st century crime thrillers. Otherwise it’s like a long, uncomfortable car ride, but everyone is talking Swedish. A nightmarish scenario if ever I’ve heard one.
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