Thursday 16 June 2011

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you'll know about a literary phenomenon from Sweden called The Millennium Trilogy. A posthumous release by left-wing journalist Stieg Larsson following the adventures of a character who would surely lose any Mary Sue Litmus Test... Mikael Blomkvist is - wait for it - a left-wing journalist who founded a whistleblowing magazine called Millennium that is quite blatantly based upon the real life magazine, Expo, which was founded by none other than Stieg Larsson. And that's not all... despite not being particularly good-looking and charming, Blomkvist is portrayed as a James Bond like figure who manages to get every female character in the book into bed with him. Not by any trickery... they just find him irresistable.
The other lead character is the one that the books have become famous for - Lisbeth Salander, a goth with a troubled past who also happens to be a brilliant computer hacker.

My description of Blomkvist may have led you to believe that I'm not a fan, but that's not the case. It's a fantastic story with some intriguing twists and turns, and one of the most powerful and iconic characters of recent years in Lisbeth. Last year (the year before in Sweden) it also produced three highly successful movie adaptations starring Michael Nyquist and the soon-to-be-international-superstar Noomi Rapace.



The movies have since become Sweden's biggest export since Ikea, so it isn't surprising that writers in Hollywood decided that they needed to make their own version. It's a move that I would have found questionable if it wasn't for the fact that last year's Let Me In proved that a Hollywood adaptation of a Swedish novel that already had a Swedish movie could not only be done, but be done well, and that David Fincher was on board to direct.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a gritty murder mystery set in a rural era of Sweden. Who better than the man who brought us the likes of Seven and Zodiac to bring it to a Hollywood audience?

The Hollywood version is due for release on Boxing Day this year, and features Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist (who better to play a character who is basically the James Bond of activist journalism than James Bond himself, right?), and Rooney Mara - previously briefly seen in The Social Network - as Lisbeth Salander. A couple of weeks ago, a trailer and poster for the movie were released, and the purists decided to air their disgust. Apparently the fact that the poster features a naked Lisbeth with Mikael's protective arm around her is enough to prove that they've missed the entire point, and the movie is going to be terrible.

The first reason is the alleged "sexualisation" of the character of Lisbeth. Well, she's naked, I'll give you that. But she isn't in any kind of an erotic pose. If just being naked is enough to convey sexualisation, then we'd better stop letting children into art galleries. The people who say she'd never use her body like that? Well, she does have random casual sex with multiple people throughout the course of the books and movies, so she's obviously not entirely opposed to sexualisation.

The second reason given is the fact that Rooney Mara has breasts, when Lisbeth was clearly described as flat-chested in the books. I'm sorry people, but the reason she was flat-chested in the books is because she was also described as anorexic. If you're going to demand that the character looks exactly as described, then you'll practically be asking an actress to force herself into an unhealthy shape to fit your vision of the character... which when you are praising the character for her "liberated woman" portrayal sounds pretty hypocritical. Some actors - like Christian Bale - may be willing to go that far for a role, but it's not something I'd recommend to anybody.

The third and final reason is the fact that that poster makes her look vulnerable, with Mikael being the defender. I concede this is true, and this is not how she has been portrayed by any other media in the past... but you've got to remember this is only the promotional campaign. It's perfectly possible that this is an artistic representation of the mindset of one of the characters - ie: Mikael... the James Bond-style womaniser who thinks of himself as a champion of women's rights. It's made quite clear that his perception of his relationship with Lisbeth is that she is the weak and vulnerable damsel in distress that needs him to rescue her. The fact of the matter is that it's often the other way around, with him getting into scrapes that only she can get him out of. So yes, it's out of character if you take the poster literally, but if taken as a reflection of Mikael's viewpoint, it is completely in character.

Now why, I hear you ask, would the advertising campaign for a movie called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo be from the viewpoint of Mikael and not the eponymous "Girl"? Well, here's the thing... the original title for the book and movie in Sweden was actually Men Who Hate Women. It was changed to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for its English language release, and this combined with the focal point of the movies being Noomi Rapace gives the impression that the trilogy is her story. It's not, though. It is Mikael's story. The books follow his investigations, his life... Lisbeth plays a major part in this story, because she becomes a major part of Mikael's life. Funnily enough, with all of the cries of sexism regarding the Hollywood movie daring to depict a nude Lisbeth in the promotional material, sexism appears to have been a part of why Noomi Rapace became the focal point for promotion of the movie in the first place.

Noomi is a fantastic actress, and without a doubt the best thing about the Swedish movies, but I'm not sure she would have dominated posters and press coverage as much if she also wasn't an extremely attractive woman. As a result of this refocusing of the story onto this character, when the originally planned TV miniseries was cut down to three movies, the cut of the movies also placed more emphasis on the scenes with Lisbeth. The full length TV versions of the films reinsert a lot of material that gives Mikael more screentime.

The moral of the story is, do not base your entire opinion of a movie on promotional material (one person I've seen even said the movie would be bad, it seems entirely because they didn't like Trent Reznor and Karen O's cover of Led Zeppelin's 'The Immigrant Song' - which, by the way, is amazing). Don't base your entire opinion of the movie on whether or not it's a remake of a movie you already like. You may just be surprised... after all, watch Infernal Affairs and The Departed back to back and tell me which is the far better movie. I'm sure 9 out of 10 of you will pick Martin Scorsese's version, and for good reason.