Charismatic Mara Soars in Dragon Tattoo

By John Wirt
Movie critic
December 23, 2011
http://theadvocate.com/entertainment/calendarsevents/1607025-123/charismatic-mara-soars-in-dragon.html

Following the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of
Rings series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, likely
the first installment of a new round of hit movies based
on a vastly popular literary source, arrives in theaters
this week.

As with previous widely anticipated fiction-to-film
adaptations, director David Fincher and screenwriter
Steven Zaillian's choices will be widely debated by fans
of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium
Trilogy. Nonetheless, their stylishly crafted American
interpretation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has
much to recommend it, especially for non-Millennium
Trilogy followers who won't get hung up on the story's
unavoidable abridgement. For a mainstream release, it's
also unusually graphic and brutal.

First and foremost the film's success rides upon the
till now obscure Rooney Mara and her performance as
Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the tattoos and laptop
computer.

Salander is the series' brilliant, 23-year-old
cyberspace detective, a damaged, nonsocial Goth-girl
with many tattoos and piercings, ever-evolving
hairstyles and kick-butt defensive skills.

Mara, previously seen with Michael Cera in the little-
seen Youth in Revolt and as Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend
in the Fincher-directed The Social Network, claims the
Salander character for herself. She does so with such
authority that it's difficult to see anyone else as the
Millennium Trilogy's alluring, underdog heroine.

Running 158 minutes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
centers upon the mystery that an elderly Swedish
industrialist has obsessed about for 40 years.
Christopher Plummer, in another of his dependably
colorful character roles, easily slips into the role of
Henrik Vanger, whose niece, Harriet, vanished in 1966.

Vanger believes she was murdered by someone in the
Vanger family.

The Vangers, despite their enormous wealth, are a
twisted lot. Mostly estranged from one another, they
include alcoholics and at least one unapologetic Nazi.
Given such lineage, Henrik Vanger's assumption about his
niece's fate surely isn't beyond credible.

The industrialist hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced
journalist from Stockholm, to come to the Vanger
family's private, snowy island off the Swedish coast and
investigate Harriet's disappearance. He promises
Blomkvist that he'll come to know the most despicable
group of people he will ever meet. "My family," the old
man adds with some amusement.

British actor Daniel Craig (Casino Royale and Quantum of
Solace) handily, earnestly fills Blomkvist's shoes but,
of course, this is Mara's movie.

When Blomkvist and Lisbeth, soon to be partners in the
Harriet Vanger investigation, are introduced they're
both in dark places.

Lisbeth, judged mentally incompetent by the state, does
not control the income she makes through her virtuoso
cyber skills. She's under the hypocritical heel of a
sadistic social services bureaucrat who, as far as the
state is concerned, can decide whether she retains
limited freedom or is confined to a mental institution.

Blomkvist, the co-owner of an investigative magazine,
Millennium, has just been convicted of libel. After
losing his life savings to the libel judgment, he
accepts Henrik Vanger's profitable assignment to probe
Harriet's disappearance.

The movie's set-up pays off, largely because it lets
Salander loose to do her sleuthing and enact some well-
deserved revenge, to smashing effect. There will be
blood. Hardened and wizened by years of bad breaks, she
is an avenging angel in black.

Charismatically played by Mara in Fincher's coolly
executed, moody depiction of Larsson's book, the
tattooed girl really does kick a hornet's nest.

___________________________________________

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