Last night, a few friends and I were lucky enough to get into the Mouth Taped Shut New York screening of David Fincher’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”.
And here’s how it went.
Note: I’m going to try and not lean on “here’s how this one was different from/better than the original film/the book, but it’ll happen from time to time.
Also, there are lots of spoilers, so, be warned.
After a little more than an hour out in the cold, we were ushered into the theater, stripped of our cell phones and given a free Dragon Tattoo poster (the same one that was going for fifteen or twenty dollars at the Hard X Mouth Taped Shut events…which were kind of pointless, by the way).
Right around ten o’clock, a man showed up and told us to look on the back of seats for an “X”, and that whoever was in or closest to that seat would get a free “razor blade” Dragon Tattoo poster…signed by Trent Reznor.
I was not that person.
Then the lights dimmed and, after a short scene introducing Henrik Vanger, Dectective Morell and a pressed flower in a picture frame…the title sequence began.
A few days ago a “mysterious video” was posted on Pitchfork that served as a sort of music video for Karen O., Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ cover of “Immigrant Song”; it turns out this was merely a blurred glimpse at the full, mind-blowing title sequence for the film.
I won’t spoil it for you, I’ll simply say everything is made of technology and tar and hands and nightmares and your head will explode after watching it.
While it isn’t as pivotal to the plot as the opening sequences of Fincher’s other films such as “Fight Club”, in which the viewer is taken from the part of “Jack’s” brain where Tyler Durden exists, to the opening shot of the film or “Se7en”, in which the viewer sees John Doe and the creation of his notebooks, it’s certainly just as visually stunning, if not more so.
The images in it and their thematic relation to the film almost make it seem more like the opening credits to one of the recent Bond film (there’s even Daniel Craig).
After this intro, the film begins.
On the whole, the film has an excellent flow to it; introducing both main characters, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist and anti-social hacker/master researcher Lisbeth Salander, then slowly bringing them together about halfway through the film in a wonderfully awkward scene involving lesbianism. While Daniel Craig delivers a rock solid performance as the harried, world weary Blomkvist, Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander is the obvious star here. From the first time you see her hollow, hungry face, you really can’t take your eyes off her. You’ll notice something new about her, some little detail, every time you see her. She manages to steal just about every scene she’s in, sometimes merely by being there, silently staring with her huge, angry eyes. That is, by the way, not a slight to the rest of the cast, more a credit to Mara’s screen presence.
Christopher Plummer’s Henrik Vanger is replete with aged, brittle dignity, Stellan Skarsgård’s Martin Vanger is polite and charming, even when he’s psychotic and brutal (his “conversation” with Blomkvist in the exceptionally designed kill room hidden beneath his home is bone-chilling…and he doesn’t raise his voice once. It also brings up some interesting, baffling questions regarding human nature) and Yorick van Wageningen as Nils Bjurman…well, I hope this fat, scummy fuck enjoys typecasting, because he is perfect in this role, so much so that the first time he appears on screen, the entire audience bristled with discomfort and disgust, and when Lisbeth hits him with her taser at the top of her revenge scene, the audience cheered. Maybe he and Dylan Baker (the pedophile/psychiatrist from 1998’s Happiness) can start a We're-So-Good-At-Playing-Horrific-Inhuman-Mosters-On-Film-That-You’ll-Never-See-Us-As-Anything-Else-Ever-Again Club…the first rule of which is you don’t talk about it…
The plethora of awful-yet-necessary research scenes from the book are present and accounted for, given more screen time than one would think to give to characters staring at books and computers, but they’re actually made bearable (not quite enjoyable, but bearable) by the accompanying music and cinematography. As I always say, if you must have a library research scene, make sure it’s scored by Trent Reznor and directed by David Fincher.
Not everything about the movie was great though…
After reading a few interviews with Fincher and his production team, I’d have thought that Sweden and its cold, desolate environs would have played more of a character in the film, but I was a bit let down to find that wasn’t the case. Remember when Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman walked into the Gluttony crime scene in “Se7en”? Remember how the lighting was practically a character in the room with them? I never really got a sense of that in Dragon Tattoo. The whole thing was shot beautifully, but, aside from a few moments here and there (Bjurman’s bound foot, passing in front of the light during Lisbeth’s revenge scene, that first shot of Henrik’s massive mansion sliding towards the viewer like a predator), nothing took my breath away.
I will say that the score lowered the temperature of the whole film by about fifty degrees. Reznor and Ross spoke about “experimenting with space” this time around, but, more than space, I think they’ve harnessed the ability to actually lower the temperature of the listener. Almost every one of the thirty-nine tracks on the score has an inescapably chilly feel to it, whether it’s the dynamic, crashing “A Thousand Details” or the Akira Yamaoka-esque “With The Files”, you can feel a bitter wind blowing while you listen to their compositions.
Unlike they’re work on “The Social Network” score, this time around, the music fits the subject matter perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, the “Social Network” score was groundbreaking, “The Social Network” was excellent, but the “Social Network” score in “The Social Network”? Honestly, it never worked for me.
Let me put it another way: I could picture different, more typical music behind “The Social Network” (more along the lines of that Elvis Costello song originally slated for the opening scene), but I cannot imagine “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” without the Reznor/Ross score. It is married to the film and vice versa.
Basically, David Fincher commissioned Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to make a “Ghosts I-IV” just for him, “Ghosts V-VIII”, if you will (“But, Trent, could you use a hammered dulcimer rather than a marimba?”).
The only downside to the music was that Fincher didn’t use nearly enough of it.
Admittedly, I didn’t have the cue list and the liner notes with me at the screening, but I’ve been listening to nothing but the score for the past five days and I could have sworn they didn’t use more than a quarter of it. Some of my favorite tracks (“A Thousand Details”, “An Itch”, “Hypomania”, “Parallel Timelines With Alternate Outcomes”) weren’t used at all, while several tracks (“Hidden In Snow”, “Under The Midnight Sun”, “She Reminds Me Of You”) were used more than once (or twice, in some scenes).
In the end though, what they did use and where they chose to use it, for the most part, worked perfectly.
I’m very much looking forward to a commentary track with Reznor and Ross when this is released on disc.
Two more tiny things before I wrap this up: first, there’s a nice little nod to Nine Inch Nails when Lisbeth first visits Plague, and, second, this movie has some of the best cat acting I’ve seen in a while, since “Cat’s Eye” perhaps…
Overall, this movie is complex and beautiful, and the interactions between Fincher’s Salander and Blomkvist work for me more than Niels Arden Oplev’s (there’s a cute moment when Lisbeth tells Mikael in her solemn, little voice to “put your hand back inside my shirt”), plus, Fincher gets the ending from the book perfectly.
And I’m a huge Nine Inch Nails fan who hasn’t missed an update to Comes Forth In The Thaw since it popped up about a month and a half ago.
At its heart, this is a bigger, slicker version of the Swedish film from two years ago, give or take several million dollars.
I’m not going to say “Noomi who?” when it comes to her portrayal of Lisbeth, but Rooney Mara is pretty incredible in this.
Fincher focuses more on the characters while Oplev focuses more on the world of the characters.
Bottom line? Although this movie is truly excellent, I don’t see the need for it.
Yes, I’m glad for nearly three hours of new music from one of my favorite artists.
Yes, I’m glad David Fincher is getting some well earned love from the critics.
Yes, I’m not a huge fan of movies with subtitles (not a comment on foreign films, they’re distracting is all).
But this movie didn’t need to be remade, just as a lot of people don’t think “Let The Right One In” needed to be remade.
All that said, this is just my opinion.
If you want to see it, go see it.
If you’re incensed it exists, don’t go see it.
But, here are some facts: because of this remake, David Fincher gets more freedom in the studio system, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are going to create more insane, landmark score work and people who would never in their lives think to read a book about Swedish finance, hacking and misogyny are going to be exposed to something that isn’t fucking Twilight.
People, this is a win.
No comments:
Post a Comment