The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, from Columbia Pictures and Director David Fincher, pits good against evil in this a fast action suspense thriller.
Produced by MGM and Scott Rudin Productions, it is adapted from the international best selling trilogy by the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson.
It is a parallel of two lives that intersect for a few moments to find a missing and presumed dead member of a wealthy European manufacturing family. Behind every door, every photo, every member, lies a mystery with deeper sociopathic implications than the one before.
The film opens with investigative magazine journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, facing a bank of reporters after the courts find him guilty of libeling a well-connected CEO. Craig captures the essence of the investigative journalist, relying on fact, instinct and odds of occurrence to lead him, and brings to the part vulnerability, which is a clear break from his 007 duties. As a disgraced journalist, without real credibility and no finances, he is left to the whim of the wind and freelance gigs for his next paycheck.
The sequence of events leads him to a remote part of Sweden where a secret, with a seemingly foregone conclusion, has continued over four decades. It’s here that Fincher’s use of parallels is seen most clearly to capture existing circumstances mirroring the circumstances of the characters.
Ronney Mara, played Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker with investigative skills that border on illegal, nails her performance nails spot on, the aggravated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder condition exhibited, and possibly not diagnosed, in so many suffering from victimization and sexual assault.
In one scene as she chases and fights a would-be attacker to recover her single most important possession, her computer with uncontrollable rage of PTSD, she morphs from a petite, head banging tattooed target, and visibly no match for the man, into the terrorizing Alien opposite Sigourney Weaver in the film of the same name, as she pins her attacker on the subway escalator and regains her now broken computer.
This sequence of events leads to female revenge as she is first forced to perform sexual favors as her finances are guarded by a state employee with deviant sexual predilections. She is essentially told, “if you want that, you’ll do that.” To regain her link to the outside world, she complies and walks out with the money for the property.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also stars Christopher Plummer, Joely Richardson and Robin Wright. Steven Berkoff, who is best known, or at least clearly remembered to American audiences as Victor Maitland, the suave, corrupt Art Gallery owner in Beverly Hills Cop, portrays the lifelong employee Frode. Yorick van Wageningen, new to the American screen, will be eternally remembered for his role as the sexually deviant state employee, Bjurman, placed in charge of the Salander case.
The movie vividly portrays Swedish sexual liberality and travels the techno-punk underworld and includes scenes of ecstasy fueled lesbian encounters, nudity, sexual deviance, extreme sexual violence, graphic torture and deserved retribution.
It is playing everywhere. Check your local listings for times.