The Girl is Really an Adult; Don't Bring Your Kids
Now that we have that established.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is great because of David Fincher. He is a director without gimmicks -- he always puts the movie first. This gives him leeway to make vastly different movies of the highest quality. In 2010, he gave us a gripping film about a lawsuit, of all things. It won an Oscar for Best Picture. The Social Network couldn't be more different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- except for one key point.
Remember at the beginning of The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg gets dumped? How his bitterness toward his preppy ex causes him to invent Facebook?
Well, that preppy ex is also the girl with the dragon tattoo; you'd never guess if you didn't already know. And that was the best directorial decision Fincher could have made. Rooney Mara owns the role of Lisbeth Salander -- the possibly autistic, asocial, bitter and ruthless heroine of Stieg Larsson's three novels -- like nobody else ever could.
She is even better than Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress who played Lisbeth in the original. Sorry, Swedish friends.
Lisbeth is a survivor and a world-class hacker who does things strictly on her own (mentally unhinged) terms. That's why it's such a big deal for her to join forces with Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist who has been hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, still dreamy at 82) to figure out what happened to his young niece who disappeared 40 years previously.
That is the central plot of the movie. It's exciting and mysterious and involves Swedish Nazis (!) and some really disturbing family dysfunction.
The secondary plot involves the state placing Lisbeth -- and her finances -- under the control of a sadistic lawyer (Yorick van Wageningen). He is the rapist. Lisbeth is his victim. It's hard to watch, folks, I'm not gonna lie. Especially since it isn't actually necessary to push the story forward. Is it gratuitous? A case could be made either way. Because the revenge that Lisbeth takes on him reveals the extent to which she has no boundaries, something that's essential to her character.
Larsson didn't write great novels; they can be boring one minute and salacious the next. But Fincher has turned this faulted story into a great movie. Also, Stockholm is beautiful.
