Fincher's Grey World

This weekend I decided to sit down and watch my DVD of David Fincher’s newly released The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a steal at 40% off at Barnes and Noble!), a film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel of the same title.  I had already seen the movie in theaters a few months ago, but decided on buying it because my “date” that night did not go as planned.  Who knew watching a movie with a graphic rape scene could make the night so awkward!?  Not I.

Upon viewing Fincher’s film for the second time I was able to appreciate things I missed out on originally because I spent thirty percent of the film blushing horribly behind my popcorn.  For starters, the cast is amazing, with performances by Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Daniel Craig (the sexually charged and tabloid celebrity, Mikael Blomkvist) Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), and Yorick van Wageningen (the Sadist Pig, Nils Bjurman) to name a few.  I am half way through reading the second installment in Steig’s series, titled “The Girl who Played with Fire”, and I can safely say that these actors are Steig’s characters in the flesh.  Mara plays an amazing Lisbeth, and captures every bit of her socially incompetent, but wildly smart personality down to the bone.  The actresses’ movements almost become one with Lisbeth’s as she moves across the screen, wary of her presence in places she ought not to be.  But while Lisbeth is cautious of her surroundings, she is also surprisingly comfortable, or so she appears to be.  In one of the beginning scenes of the film, Lisbeth follows an elderly woman to the front of her apartment building and pretends to be interested in her cigarette while she listens to the pass code being typed into the security system.  Ever smart, Lisbeth punches in the same code in succession and gains entrance into the building.  With her signature black clothes and baggy style, she is able to slip through almost anything.

Whereas Lisbeth is the hard-hitting character in the film, Mikael, is the opposite.  While Craig delivers a true performance, his character, like in the book, seems to be easily disposable.  Anyone could have taken the place of this tabloid, scandal-ridden character.  We spend a good amount of the beginning of the film focused on Mikael, a journalist, and we learn that he has become involved in a huge scandal.  Without any real work, Henrik Vanger hires him to solve the murder of his niece that is believed to have gone unsolved for decades.  But the clues don’t start coming together until Mikael insists on having a research assistant, which is when Salander comes into the picture.  A sleuth and hacker, Salander is able to put together pieces that Mikael has overlooked.  This is when the film starts to veer and we are now torn between the two storylines of both Salander and Mikael as they  both work to solve the mystery.  Mikael becomes almost secondary, a character that can’t keep up with the new-age, savvy, wildly sexual Salander.  It is, after, Mikael who relies on Salander to save him after he is captured by the serial killer.  And let’s not forget who helps Mikael get out of the scandal and back into being a respectable member of society (brownie points if you guessed Salander!).

            Like other films directed by Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes place within a grey world.  Characters that aren’t so seemingly normal wind up in a place where right and wrong can blend, and someone else’s view of what constitutes these terms will almost certainly not be the ones you believe in.  Much like the serial killer in Se7en, Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgard) in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is methodical with his killings.  What he deems as “right” (murdering young girls based on Bible passages) cannot be based on the illegal activities that both Salander and Mikael have committed in order to solve the mystery.  Surely their acts of breaking and entering, prostituting, and hacking computers, to name a few, are also wrong.  But weren’t they justified acts?  Vanger definitely believes his were.  It’s this knocking around of judgment, this grayness, which allows the film to be pulled in different directions.  It’s the contradicting terms (the hacking into someone’s computer, only to get mad when they hack into yours) that perhaps pulls this film down to us, because surely we also live within moments of grey.