You can only avoid some pop culture sensations for so long before you finally have to pop the cap and take a swig. A few weeks ago I finally finished Stieg Larrson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's been omnipresent for the last year, as have the other two books in his Millennium trilogy. I enjoyed the book, but the first half is very rough sledding. You have a lot of downtime with Mikael Blomkvist as he shlubs around the offices of Millennium magazine and steeps himself in endless research of the Vanger family. Then whenever we jump back to the Lisbeth Salander character, the book explodes into action. So it's back and forth between dull and dynamo. Only halfway through the novel when the two characters finally meet does the plot get cracking and the book's second half is clearly what's made such an impression on people and created such a following. Larrson has created a novel for Thomas Harris fans -- Lisbeth is part Clarice Starling, part La Femme Nikita. She's equal parts vulnerability and vendetta. By the time I'd finished, I have to admit I was gung ho to read the second book.
But first, I'd been dying to check out the movie! And the Swedish production of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is just tremendous. Director Niels Arden Opley has done a superb job of adapting the novel. His style is just as atmospheric and suspenseful as Polanski's recent Ghost Writer, but Dragon Tattoo has a lot more action. He's condensed a lot of the action and whittled away extraneous subplots, editing with a sure hand and keeping the focus on Lisbeth. It's a terrific suspense picture and wildly entertaining at times. I will probably hold off on viewing the other two films until I've read the books.
What I now can't begin to understand is why in the world David Fincher is directing a Hollywood remake (still set in Sweden, with stars speaking "accented" English...?!) of this already excellent film? Because make no mistake, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Opley's film -- it's polished and dynamic, it's not some "lesser" version of the book. It's easy to picture Fincher in Se7en/Zodiac mode, ramping up the serial killer atmosphere. But what's the point?!? Somebody already got it right the first time!
We're in the same part of the forest as the recent Hollywood adaptation of Let the Right One In becoming Let Me In. Let Me In has a good rep, but why bother? The original was brilliant as-is, and there's a reason the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so popular. Audiences dig it. It works. So why all this recycling? Is it that we're so culturally adverse to subtitles? Is that it? Are we that illiterate? It's got to be economics, plain and simple. A movie with a Hollywood cast will bank a lot more cash than one with (at the time) unknown foreign actors (though Noomi Rapace is apparently joining Ridley Scott for his weird new Prometheus/Alien prequel thingy).
Fincher is too talented to be doing a Gus Van Sant treatment of Psycho. This kind of filmmaking is Paint-by-Numbers. He ought to be creating something original, something new. His Girl is bound to be a huge hit next December, but if you haven't seen the original yet, do me a favor: run, don't walk -- and embrace the subtitles.
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