“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is more than 21/2 hours long, yet it seems remarkably compact.
Director David Fincher (“The Social Network”) and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Moneyball,” “Schindler’s List”) had a lot of ground to cover in adapting Stieg Larsson’s complexly structured best-seller to the big screen, and they succeeded in capturing the spirit and density of the novel with admirable fidelity and absolutely no wasted motion. This is one lean, mean suspense machine.
Fans of the novel will be pleased to know that it’s all here: the remote, bone-chilling Swedish setting; the revolting crimes perpetrated by an odious villain; the central mystery of what happened to 16-year-old Harriet Vanger, who vanished 40 years before the story starts; the supremely dysfunctional Vanger clan, stained by duplicity, bitterness, Nazism and worse; the disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), battered by a libel judgment, reluctantly rising to the challenge posed to him by Harriet’s devoted tycoon kinsman Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to uncover the truth of Harriet’s fate. And above all, there’s Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the titular tattoo.
A long list of Hollywood’s top young actresses coveted that part, but Fincher wisely decided to cast a relative unknown. He wanted someone with no associations to previous roles. That is to say, someone with no baggage who could disappear inside of one of the most extraordinary heroines in modern literature. He found her in Rooney Mara.
She had a small role in Fincher’s “The Social Network,” playing a no-nonsense young woman who forcefully puts Mark Zuckerberg in his place early in the picture. But nothing about her work in that movie prepares you for her portrayal of Salander. She inhabits the character fully.
With bleached eyebrows, multiple piercings, the coiling dragon adorning her back, and her punk-Goth black wardrobe, Mara certainly looks the part.
But it’s her emotional grasp that’s truly impressive. Her Salander is a terribly damaged individual who is damaged even more terribly in the course of “Dragon Tattoo,” and then exacts a terrible vengeance for what she’s suffered. She’s guarded, mistrustful, sullen and, crucially, brilliant when it comes to hacking into people’s lives via computer.
It’s those hacker skills that bring her into Blomkvist’s orbit as his research assistant, and it’s her identification with a string of horrifyingly violated women murder victims – their deaths constituting gruesome clues to the core mystery – that makes her relentless in her pursuit of the truth about what happened to the vanished Harriet.
As Blomkvist, Craig is rather too good-looking to be convincing as a rumpled journalist, but he has good chemistry with Mara, mixing admiration with a sense of bewilderment at her defiant strength and her sexual boldness.
With Fincher’s unflinching handling of Larsson’s dark material and with an insidiously propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Dragon Tattoo” moves with assurance and without too many Hollywood compromises.
Though, for a wholly uncompromising treatment of “Tattoo,” moviegoers who have not yet seen the Swedish-language version released in 2009 are advised to seek it out posthaste. While Mara’s is a fine portrayal, Noomi Rapace’s take on the character is definitive: ferocious, heroic and unforgettable.
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