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SXSW live review: “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” at the Alamo Ritz
It wasn’t all that surprising that a serious line had already formed a good hour or so before the 4:30 screening of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” After all, Ritz 1 and 2 are two of the smaller theaters in the Alamo chain. Which lead to this exchange overheard in the line:
Woman One: “He (an unseen third party) thought this should be at the Paramount. The novel was incredibly popular and this movie has been huge in Europe.”
Woman Two: “Maybe. But it’s a two and a half hour movie in Swedish with subtitles.”
You may make your own jokes about Americans and reading at movies, but both women were, in their own ways, absolutely correct. Stieg Larsson’s thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (the original Swedish title “Män som hatar kvinnor” translates roughly as “Men Who Hate Women”) was a genuine publishing phenomenon, moving millions of copies everywhere from BookPeople to WalMart airports. The movie version is the most successful Swedish movie of all time. Kristin Stewart is rumored for an American remake due in 2012.
That said, when you have Kick-Ass, the White Stripes documentary and world premiers at SXSW slated for the Paramount, somethings got to give. (Though a representative for SXSW said a long line was left outside.)
So what of the movie? There are two types of noirs: The kind with small lives and small crimes with small errors and small failings snowball into an almost inveitable ending, like an emotional Rube Goldberg device. Then there’s the kind with a massive, labyrinthine plot that might stretch decades as past crimes prove to not even be past.
“Dragon Tattoo” is the second kind, the story of crusading investigative magazine reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) convicted of libel in a very shady case. His career a mess, he’s approached by industrialist Hennrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of Vagner’s neice some 40 years earlier. Vanger loathes his extended family, and suspects any one of them for the crime.
Blomkvist is eventually joined by the titular girl, a slender, gothy angry-at-the-world hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) blessed with a photographic memory, a way with computers and a hideous past that has left her with a loathsome “guardian” (think a parole officer that has power of attorney). She looks like a crusty-punk, hacks like a knife through soft butter and is an emotional basket case — who wouldn’t fall for that?
This is not your Ikea’s Sweden. This is Sweden where a Fascist-sympathizing past intrudes on the present, where rape and incest seem all too common, where brutal capitalists can have their way with good lefty journalists with ease.
It’s also a thriller and a calmly (almost too calmly) paced one, where every twist is (for the most part) logical and, more importantly, paid off. It always plays fair with the audience. Blomkvist is quietly honorable and dogged, a man who isn’t sure if he’s a shlump or charming or when he should be one or the other. Salander’s cold and distant, but becomes just as obsessed as Blomkvist, even as she has her own scores to settle.
It’s well-crafted and stays compelling, but it also had what you might call the Harry Potter Burden: It had to remain faithful to a phenomenally popular book.
Disclosure: I haven’t read it, but a quick survey of the crowd revealed that the movie stripped the plot down as far as possible while still hitting all of the necessary plot points — it still need two and a half hours to get where it was going, but any less and fans might have been hacked off.
They were not, nor was I.
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