Movie Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

Here’s a paradox: The millions of people who have read Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” are the panting target audience for the Swedish-language film adaptation. Yet they’re also likeliest to be disappointed by this carefully crafted drama, while people who haven’t read the book are likely to enjoy the movie and wonder what the literary fuss is about.

Director Niels Arden Oplev and writers Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg preserved central incidents in the plot, paring the book down to narrative essentials. At the same time, they jettisoned character-revealing scenes and lots of back story. The result is a streamlined whodunit, except for a few underexplained events attached in a perfunctory manner. (A libel suit crucial to the novel is reduced to a vestigial bookend for the movie plot.)

Gone are the relationship between computer genius Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and her employer at a detection agency. Gone is the love affair between reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Mikael Nyqvist) and the woman who’s a prime suspect in a crime. Gone are industrial politics and social criticism.

In their places comes a straightforward but gripping story, in which a dying industrialist (Sven-Bertil Taube) hires Nyqvist to find out what happened to the 16-year-old niece who vanished in 1966.

The picture, reduced to a black-and-white kind of manhunt, is visually black-and-white as well. It’s set in the snowy landscape of rural Sweden, where the self-effacing and pale-faced Blomkvist blends into the wintry scenes.

The industrialist suspects a family member murdered the girl and has tormented him for the last four decades by sending him flowers on his birthday. He pays Salander’s firm to look into Blomkvist’s life, then pays Blomkvist to undertake the search.

Salander, fascinated by the case – this makes sense in the book, not in the movie – joins him in the hinterlands. She’s the hot, dark force amid all the chilly light: She dresses entirely in black, scowls and wears black lipstick to set off her multiple piercings. (Rapace, a former punk rocker, inserted the metal fixings in pre-existing facial holes.)

She’s fascinatingly angry, mysterious and implacable, but the filmmakers weren’t daring enough with her.

First, they soften her look as the movie goes on. (Note the changes in makeup.) And though she’s barely of legal age in the book, Rapace looks like (and is) a woman in her early 30s. Salander’s relationships with all men in the book are unhealthy versions of father-daughter roles, until she finds a measure of personal peace. But the movie’s Salander and Blomkvist meet as equals, not people who have to bridge such a large gap.

All three of Larsson’s Blomkvist-Salander novels have now been filmed in Sweden, so perhaps details about characters will be parceled out through the remaining installments. Maybe we’ll even find out why Salander has the title tattoo, which is visible for a few seconds but never discussed. (The Swedish title translates to the more literal “Man Who Hates Women.”)

Yet it’s hardly fair for a filmmaker to assume we’ll see three films in order to fully understand the first. “Dragon Tattoo” can stand alone, but it would have stood taller if it didn’t lean on its sequels.

P.S. Larsson, who died at 50 in 2004, was a print journalist all his life. So although Salander hacks e-mails and cracks private accounts via a laptop, she discovers the crucial clue to the mystery in…a newspaper photo. In the age of Web worship, that’s a paradox, too.