The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (American version)

Or, revenge is Swede.

First, I have to admit that I could not finish the book this movie was based on. I totally failed to be interested in either the righteous liberal magazine editor or the insular Swedish Krupps.

Interestingly, I totally failed to be interested in either of these when watching the movie, either. But it mattered less because books are about who, what, and where, and films are about whee! and wow! and whoa!

And there is plenty of those in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There's been a lot of talk about Rooney Mara's electrifying performance as the princess of damaged goods, Lisbeth Salander--all of it justified, and more on that later. But I wonder if Fincher's true muse here is actually Trent Reznor.

The electro-orgasmic credits to this movie are somewhere between a Bjork music video and a Jan Svankmajer film. Set to a Led Zeppelin song voiced by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, it's as breathlessly eerie as the opening sequence of Fincher's Se7en, which is set to a remix of NIN's Closer. 

Reznor wrote the rest of the score as well, and it's chillingly beautiful. Dress warmly when watching this movie. I had to turn up the thermostat. Sweden, in Fincher's movie, becomes a place where suicide seems eminently logical, if only because hell is warm.

As a result, many of the actors seem like they're trying to emote through a coating of hoarfrost. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the above-mentioned goody-goody magazine editor. Surprisingly, James Bond is completely conventional and adds little to the movie, except perhaps the interesting footnote that somebody with so much charisma is capable of making it all disappear.

Blomkvist's main squeeze is his editor Erika Berger, who you may recognize as Robin Wright with a terrible wig, unless you blink and miss her. 

Blomkvist, having been disgraced (unjustly, natch) by an evil corporate magnate, is invited to a remote Swedish island where good corporate magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) and his various crazy relatives reside. Blomkvist is tasked with discovering who murdered Vanger's niece Harriet in 1966. 

As I've already mentioned, it's kind of hard to care, since Harriet isn't even a character in the movie. But the movie is energized by Rooney Mara, who slices through the frost with the taser that seems to be her weapon of choice. 

In a world filled with crazy people, the patently insane Salander is the only sane one. She's the only character with any nuance; everybody else is a straw man or a figurehead or a stereotype. She's blasé in a vitriolic way; depressive, but not passive; vulnerably violent. 

The real mystery of the movie's first half, though, is why Salander is even in it. She prepares a report on Blomkvist for the Vangers, and then continues on breathing life into the movie despite appearing to have no involvement with it. She hacks, cracks, snoops, spies, and in one very memorable scene...takes the subway. 

Once Blomkvist hires her to help with the investigation into Harriet's death, though, the other half of the movie begins to warm up as well. She turns his life upside down, a cybergenius Oscar to his journalistic Felix, or a punk Q to his tired, middle-aged Bond. She's the real hero, not Blomkvist, and she saves the day.

In the end, we find out who the bad guy is, and it turns out--SURPRISE!--that he's bad because his daddy abused him. Can the movie industry as a whole please retire this tired pop-psych trope or at least rotate it with something more creative? It's ironic that a movie which has a heroine who continues to fight for good despite being brutally abused also features a villain with such a cheap-shot background. Plus, even parental abuse can't explain the actor's central-casting portrayal of the villain. He does everything but cackle hysterically. 

Even worse, the movie doesn't end there. It segues maladroitly into an epilogue that aims to bring the story full circle--back to the corporate baddie who railroaded Blomkvist in the prelude. Salander has already punished two of the three bad guys in the movie, and now she heads off to do her thing on the third. But it's not as satisfying as the first two. Throughout the movie, Salander's near-magic cyberskills and Olympian vengeance have strained credibility somewhat, but Mara's winning performance has kept it from snapping. This final sequence really pushes that credibility to its breaking point.

To be fair, it was very late at that point, and I could have taken the opportunity to turn it off, go to sleep and finish it the next night, but I didn't. And the final shot might be worth the silliness and the wait--the movie finishes with a whoa! that I didn't expect, but of a very different, and welcome, kind than the one it began with.