The Antisocial Network
by Steve Dollar 
No one has to hold their breath to discover how the Swedish literary phenomenon/
cult film trilogy launcher
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been
Fincherized. As Karen O. ululates on the soundtrack, over the tribal throb and industrial crunge of Trent Reznor's reboot of Led Zeppelin's Viking hoedown "Immigrant Song," the title sequence splashes the screen in mysterious black ink. Abstract anatomies and data-delivery devices twist and morph in a hallucinogenic, sensual swirl, suggesting a James Bond opening as imagined by
Panos Cosmatos in
Beyond the Black Rainbow.
OK, then. Maybe we can hope for David Fincher to one-up
J. J. Abrams and snatch up the 007 franchise on the next round? Or, more to the point, perhaps the remakes of the so-called Millennium Trilogy are to become the director's own version-of-a-version: a mass-cult template that can be seamlessly utilized to project the filmmaker's own obsessions and compulsions with technology, subversion, black leather, forensic drudge-work, serial killers, gothic funk, underground conspiracies, bipolar freakiness, pulse-quickening displays of the art of montage and the antisocial network.
If there is a single human being yet breathing who is not intimately familiar with the workings of late Swedish journalist Stieg Larrson's posthumously published psycho thrillers... that human being would be me. I didn't even see the Swedish movies, which played U.S. theaters in 2010. Aside from some general plot and character details, mostly regarding the celebrated persona of uber/anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander, there wasn't much to sully my expectations. Rather, the story was another jagged-edged fragment in the evolving crime-scene investigation of Fincher's career?a mutant, ice-veined spawn of
Zodiac and
The Social Network, with a dose of
Se7en's creepy Biblical fixation, and, thanks to cast, remote northern locale and twisted family saga, occasional glimmers of Ingmar Bergman.
That slick opening is a bit of a toss-off, really. Much of
Dragon Tattoo is origin myth introduction/explication, mapped out in microscopic detail, as if clicking away on a laptop, whooshing a Google Street View icon ever closer to pixelated revelation. Indeed, that's what the novel's twin sleuths?disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (
Daniel Craig, Mr. Shaken-Not-Stirred 7.0 himself) and feral, cyber-punk savant Salander (Rooney Mara)?spend much of their time doing themselves. The glue that binds their parallel biographies is a theme of bad reputation and the return of the repressed. When Blomkvist accepts an insane assignment to solve a decades-old murder from an industrialist (
Christopher Plummer) with one foot in the grave and a clan full of Nazi kooks, decadent miscreants, gun nuts and that smug sonuvabitch
Stellan Skarsgard, he really has few other options. The money's nice, but what he really wants is to even the score with the man who has stripped him of his honor.
Salander, a wild-child ward of the state whose fierce intellect doesn't come close to exceeding her taste for revenge upon the flesh of her abusers, is in it for blood. A motorcycle-racing Valkyrie with a pierced nipple and a hacker's regard for institutional regulation, she's a magnificent invention because she evokes so many associations. In Mara's kohl-eyed, blond-browed incarnation, she's by turns an alt-porn possum blinking into a video surveillance camera and a whippet-framed cousin of
Sigourney Weaver's alien-blasting Ripley, all sinew and no fear?until you peel back the tough facade to find the shivering soul underneath. If anyone ever succeeds in turning
William Gibson's dystopian classic
Neuromancer into a movie, well, here's your Razor Girl. But she also calls to mind Rilke: "Every angel is terrifying." (In what is sure to be the movie's second-most-talked-about scene, Mara/Salander turns the tables on a scumbag guardian in what has to be the most creative use of extremely amateur tattooing skills since
Bellflower).
Character dynamics and infinitesimal (and seemingly infinite) digging drive Fincher's adaptation, which like all good whodunits is littered?nay, scattered, covered and smothered?with dead-end distractions. You, good reader (and watcher) know all about them in advance, I'd presume, so when Craig hauls out the Old Testament and starts matching up dire verses from Leviticus with graphic photographs of a hooker's slaying, seeking clues to the long-ago vanishing of a (putative) 14-year-old virgin, one's mind begins to race all over the place. (What of this sub-sub-plot turn of Blomkvist's teenage daughter passing through his middle-of-nowhere outpost on her way to
Bible School?) Like the Nazi skeletons in the family closet, and darkening intimations of more unspeakable horrors, its substance is mostly so much smoke?not that there isn't a surplus of that already. Between the two of them, Salander and the backsliding nicotine addict Blomkvist annihilate enough butts to keep a Bowery mission full of panhandlers fully stocked and wheezing 'til next Christmas.
The sexual connection between Mara and Craig's characters, which strangely does mimic the usual course of affairs in one of the latter actor's secret agent scenarios, feels at once inevitable and kind of a sell out. The bonking isn't exotic; it's purely functional, although perhaps designed to show off Mara's American Apparel model's bod and somehow lend more conventional, hetero-normative appeal to Salander's androgynous Psycho Spice persona and approach/avoidance aura. But it also establishes a deeper urgency for when the shit hits the fan. In the film's most thrilling montage, both she and Craig's out-of-his-depth, anything-but-Bondian Blomkvist discover who the villain is at more or less the same moment, a sequence that faintly emulates the finale of
The Silence of the Lambs. Plus knockout gas. Plus Enya!
Long before the new age marvel's "Orinoco Flow" lights up the screen with its
American Psycho moment, an instance of perverse levity after two hours of soundtrack composers Reznor and Atticus Finch's persistent, percussive disorientation, I'd been thinking that
Dragon Tattoo was a tad cheesy in stretches, especially for Fincher. And here, at its cheesiest, it was most brilliant. If he opts to shoot the next two Hollywood remakes in the series, Fincher could be the rare adaptive franchiser to make his source as compelling as his own vision without chipping away at an otherwise impeccable auteur rep. In fact, the more the material skews Fincherwise the better. Not to speak ill of the dead, but the film's weaknesses (the essentially stupid plodding premise for the mystery that never adds up to anything) are Larsson's and its triumphs both a matter of directorial style and of Mara's raw-boned performance, at once as ravished and laser-like in focus, certainly, as anything in mainstream American cinema this year?if we can call a film "mainstream" in which not one but two acts of violent non-consensual sodomy are prominently featured. The hammer of the gods? Um, thanks, I'll try the decaf.
Posted by ahillis at December 27, 2011 1:09 PM
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