Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Director:Niels Arden Oplev
Screenplay: Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg (based on the novel by Stieg Larsson)
Producer: Søren Stærmose
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube
Year: 2009
Country: Sweden
MPAA Rating: Not Rated (would be R)
Duration: 152 min




(4.5/5)There are a couple of things that I tend to find deadly dull in movies that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was in danger of falling into – mysteries that wallow in the detectives’ personal trauma to the exclusion of the mystery itself, and adaptations of best-selling books that feel the need to be so faithful there’s no room to breathe as a film. Thankfully, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo skirts both of these concerns deftly, managing to balance the mystery with the deep backstory of investigators Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, and also adapting the novel with a judicious eye for cuts and modifications, even improving it in some cases.
Mikael Blomkvist (played with both gravity and ease by veteran Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist) is an investigative journalist just convicted for libel after an expose-gone-wrong. He’s mysteriously summoned to a northern village by Henrik Vanger, 82-year-old former CEO of the Vanger Corporation and patriarch of the sprawling Vanger family. Henrik has a 40-year-old mystery that he’d like Blomkvist to take one last stab at before Henrik succumbs to his advanced age – the murder of his grand-niece Harriet in 1966. Intrigued, Blomkvist agrees and begins working his way through cold evidence and long-dead leads. Meanwhile, brilliant but eccentric researcher Lisbeth Salander, who had been hired by Vanger to do a background check on Blomkvist before Vanger contacted him, finds herself drawn into the mystery as well – but not before she takes care of some business of her own.





(4/5)
Bob and Carol (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) attend a self-discovery retreat, initially because Bob intends to make a film about it, but after a revelatory and emotional group counseling session, they become believers and want to share their new-found enlightenment with their best friends Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon). But Ted and Alice aren’t quite ready for their friends’ touchy-feely gospel and being told that they should live in total openness and truth makes them more uncomfortable than anything. Here I expected the film to side with Bob and Carol unequivocally and paint Ted and Alice as hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch. But actually, the film is more balanced and thoughtful than that.








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