sweden

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Director: Niels Arden Oplev): Though I’m not usu­ally sus­cept­ible to the mar­keting hype that sur­rounds pub­lishing “phe­nomenons” like the Harry Potter, Twilight, or DaVinci Code books, I do have a bit of a soft spot for Scandinavian crime thrillers. My ini­tial enjoy­ment of Stieg Larsson’s book has cooled a little after reading the second in the series, but I still found it an enjoy­able read. The film ver­sion, now more than a year old, has finally been released on DVD and Blu-ray in English Canada after a belated the­at­rical run earlier this spring. Strangely, Alliance released the film in Quebec in 2009, and I believe all three films in the “Millennium” series have already come and gone to cinemas in La Belle Province. My theory is that Alliance was waiting to see what was hap­pening with the planned English-language (Hollywood) remakes, and decided there was still time to make a little money before those came out. I’m not being cyn­ical. Foreign-language films are a hard sell in English Canada, even if they are based on hugely suc­cessful books. The timing of the DVD release coin­cides nicely with the the­at­rical release of the second film in the tri­logy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, which opened here in Toronto this past weekend. But that’s enough pre­amble, what did I think of the film?

Well, for such a plot-heavy book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also man­ages to intro­duce an inter­esting cast of char­ac­ters. Though journ­alist Mikael Blomkvist (played in the film by Michael Nyqvist) and hacker Lisbeth Salander (a chis­elled Noomi Rapace) are clearly the focus, I enjoyed a number of the minor char­ac­ters and felt that their rela­tion­ships with Mikael and Lisbeth helped fill out the story. Unfortunately, with all the plot ele­ments to cover, the film has dis­pensed with many of the other char­ac­ters and even jet­tisoned some important storylines. For instance, in the book, Mikael is car­rying on an open affair with his magazine’s pub­lisher, Erika Berger, who at one point visits him at his cabin on the island of Hedeby. He also car­ries on a sexual rela­tion­ship with Cecilia Vanger, a member of the extended family he’s invest­ig­ating. These rela­tion­ships provide some insight into Blomkvist’s per­son­ality and his self-image as a bit of a ladies’ man and add some ten­sion to his bud­ding rela­tion­ship with Lisbeth. Both char­ac­ters are in the film, but just barely.

Lisbeth is a mys­ter­ious young woman with a troubled past. In the book, she has two important sup­porters. Dragan Armansky, the head of Milton Security, gives Lisbeth a job and looks out for her. Holger Palmgren is her appointed guardian and trustee before a debil­it­ating stroke leads to his replace­ment by the sin­ister Nils Bjurman. Neither of these important char­ac­ters appears in the film.

These are unfor­tu­nate omis­sions, but I can’t say that they’re unex­pected. The plot of the book is more than enough to fill out the film’s nearly 150 minute run­ning time, but as a result, it rather sim­pli­fies the story, leading to an enjoy­able film that fades from the memory much more quickly than the book. Granted, books are immersive worlds that can fill weeks of our lives at a time, so my quibbles are true of just about all book-to-film adapt­a­tions. I can say that I’m still plan­ning to catch the second install­ment, hope­fully while it’s still in theatres. Helpfully, Alliance has included a “sneak peek” look at The Girl Who Played With Fire on the Blu-ray por­tion of the combo pack, as well as inter­views with star Noomi Rapace and pro­ducer Soren Staermose. Perhaps indic­ating the begin­ning of a trend, the spe­cial fea­tures are not included on the DVD disc.

(7/10)

Tagged as: basedonthenovel, sweden

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