Eye Candy #590 - "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:  The first of the American adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy novels, this film skews heavily towards the book’s original Swedish title: “Men Who Hate Women”.  Mikael Blomkvist (played by Daniel Craig) is a disgraced journalist who was successfully sued for libel.  He is hired by an elderly Swedish business magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to write his memoirs and look into the disappearance and presumed murder of his niece some 40 years ago, while she and the rest of their extended family were summering on their private island.   This involves him interacting with other members of Vanger’s family, not all of whom are receptive to Blomkvist’s task and all of whom have skeletons in their respective closets.  To aid in his investigation, Blomkvist hires an investigator, Lisbeth Salander (played extremely well by Rooney Mara), an emotionally and socially isolated computer hacker with baggage of her own, including various abusive relationships dating all the way back to her childhood.  Salander develops a close relationship with Blomkvist through the course of their investigation as they discover the trail of a serial killer obsessed with Biblically-inspired mutilation.  This is a pared-down version of the novel’s plot (most of the financial thriller aspects of the last ¼ of the book are handled minimally), but still runs at over 2 ½ hours (it doesn’t feel that long, though).  The film includes heavy doses of nudity, violence towards women, profanity, rape, incest, murder, and torture…it’s not a movie for the faint of heart.  In fact, the rape scene is darn near one of most disturbing scenes ever committed to film and should make anyone uncomfortable.  The script is good and serves the plot well, the performances from the main and supporting cast are uniformly excellent, including Joely Richardson, Steven Berkoff (in a rare nice guy role) and Stellan Skarsgard.  Those who haven’t read the books may get lost in the weeds – some characters are introduced without identifying who they are, particularly Salander’s hacker friends.  Director David Fincher made his bones with dark thrillers like “Se7en” and this film is more in that vein than his more recent works like “The Social Network” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.  A very watchable film.  A sequel covering the second Millenium novel is in the works.  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”