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The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo
(2009
- Sweden and 2011 - USA)
by Johnny Web (Uncle
Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
2011 - COMPLETE spoilers
I'm not kidding about
that "spoilers" warning. Do not read this if you don't
want to ruin the experience of watching a mystery
film, because I'm going to discuss plot minutiae and
the various solutions to the mystery, as presented by
three different sources.
There is a vital lesson to be learned in the succession
of projects that have taken this story from a book to a
Swedish movie to an American remake, and that lesson is
this: if you must re-write plot details in a mystery or
a thriller, you need to bring in several other people to
read the script to make sure that you haven't messed up
other things dependent on the original unchanged
details. It is normal in this kind of plot for all the
details to interlock, and if you change one thing you'll
probably have to change several others which relate to
that one.
Here's the problem: the core of the exposition in this
story hinges on a woman presumed murdered who is not
actually dead. Her beloved uncle hires an investigative
reporter to figure out which of his relatives killed
her. In the original story, the "dead" girl had been
sending her uncle a distinctive kind of flower
arrangement every year since her disappearance. Since
those arrangements were identical to the ones she had
given him while she was "alive," she presumed that the
uncle would realize that she was still alive. The uncle
did not make that assumption. He assumed that her killer
was taunting him.
The Swedish movie handled the resolution of this plot
detail correctly. As soon as the woman found out about
the despair she had caused her beloved uncle all those
years, she rushed to meet him in person, traveling
immediately all the way from a remote part of Australia
to an equally remote part of northern Sweden, because
she just had to atone for the pain she had inadvertently
caused him.
The problem began when the American scriptwriters
changed the identity of the missing girl. The change
that they made was very clever, and I would call it a
significant improvement - except for one important
factor: changes do not exist in a vacuum. When they
changed the identity of the missing girl, they forgot
that she had been trying to tell her uncle that she was
alive. At one point in the investigation, the reporter,
not knowing who she was at the time, told her that her
uncle was distraught by her death, and was still
obsessed with it after many decades. So did she rush to
his side? Not at all. She didn't even pick up the damned
phone to call the old codger to offer some comfort to
his final days. But we know from the annual flower
arrangement that she really wanted her uncle to know she
was alive. So why did she do nothing after finding out
that her gift had been misinterpreted? The script
re-write turned her into a cruel witch, but she couldn't
have been that cruel because she sent the flowers in the
first place. So the script simply ended up with a
contradiction. She loved the uncle so much that she
wanted him to know she was alive, but when she found out
that he had misinterpreted the annual gifts and that his
old age was filled with despair because of her "death,"
she suddenly didn't care enough about him to make a
simple phone call, let alone fly immediately to his
side.
I must have seen something like this happen in about a
hundred different adapted scripts over the years, just
because the scriptwriters felt like tinkering without
considering all the ramifications of their changes.
There were a few other plot points that were much
clearer in the Swedish version.
1. It was clear in the
original that the reporter was convicted of libel, was
sentenced to jail time, and was convicted justly.
This was an important and interesting sub-plot,
because the reporter was duped into printing an
inaccurate story. He was just simply outsmarted. The
reporter had been on the trail of a legitimate expose.
His target, a corrupt industrialist, tricked him off
the trail by "offering" him a much bigger story
through a trusted old friend. The so-called friend
turned out to be on the payroll of the industrialist
all along, and the bigger story turned out to be
totally false. Although the original, smaller story
had been accurate, the reporter's libel conviction
totally undermined his credibility and made it
impossible for him to go back to the first story, or
even to get any more work as a reporter. In fact, he
had to go to the Swedish slammer for his crime, and
part of the film's ongoing investigation was conducted
by Lisbeth the hacker (the title character) while the
reporter was in jail.
2. Even though the allegedly murdered girl was still
alive, there actually was a murderer in the family
(actually two!) and though they had not killed the
presumed victim, they apparently had killed the
remaining female population of Sweden. (Yeah, I know.
How convenient that the investigation turned up a
murderer even though the "victim" was still alive.)
Late in the story, the reporter knew who the killer
was, and the killer was aware that the reporter had
figured it out. After all that had been established,
the killer even caught the reporter in his yard after
he had snuck out of his house. So what happened than?
The killer called the reporter back in, and the
reporter came, not at gunpoint, but of his own
volition. That was an absolute WTF situation. The
reporter would have known at that time that he was
returning to his own death, but he just amiably
returned. I watched the film in a packed theater, and
the entire audience groaned when Daniel Craig's
character, caught with his hand in the cookie jar,
meekly marched back into the killer's lair, to certain
doom, instead of just running the hell away. Needless
to say, nothing similar to that happened in the book
or the original movie.
3. In the original film, the killer was using his
influence to squelch the investigation, as you might
expect. In the remake, the killer was actually
overriding other people who wanted to suppress the
investigation, and was offering all possible
co-operation! At one point he could have ended the
entire investigation and blamed that decision entirely
on the company's attorney, who was an honest and
respected man. Again ... WTF? Are we to assume that he
wanted to get caught? Nothing else in the script
indicated that.
What was purpose of tinkering with these plot points,
which were all perfectly logical in the earlier versions
of the tale? I just don't know.
I give David Fincher lots of points for the way he
managed the look, the dramatic tension, and the
atmosphere in this film. All of the technical credits,
from the acting to the cinematography to the editing are
totally first-rate. It's a long film, but I sat through
it without ever being aware of the time because the
narrative moves quickly and clearly and is filled with
interesting details. Fincher just did a great job in
general. It's a good film. The Swedish original is
nowhere near as professional and slick.
But slick isn't everything.
What the hell, man, why make all of those unnecessary
changes? The story was perfectly good to begin with. Why
didn't you just use what you had?
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