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Movie Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

In two movies now—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network—director David Fincher has made something exciting out of the mundane. Not that the mystery at the heart of this remake isn’t engrossing, but the way its protagonists set about solving it, in the hands of just about any other Hollywood director, would be the film’s nadir. Like The Social Network‘s sequences involving long, impenetrable sequences of code, much of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is spent researching, blowing up photographs, looking through slide shows, the Bible, and, in 2011, a card catalog.

This meticulous combing through of old evidence should be boring, but it draws the eye in, asks the viewer to pitch in and solve the mystery with the detectives. It works, even if you can solve the mystery; even, I suspect, if you’ve read the original novel or seen the 2009 Swedish adaptation of it. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is beautifully crafted and well-paced. Clocking in at well over two hours, containing three seemingly unwieldy plots that don’t converge at the center until midway through the movie, Fincher manages to cast familiar territory (even if you haven’t read the novels, the set-up is pure Agatha Christie) as dark, ominous and full of dread. It’s obvious the characters in the movie are walking through a minefield. The suspense is waiting for one of them to make the wrong step.

After being brought down by a Swedish tycoon for a supposedly libelous article in Millennium Magazine, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is hired by the millionaire Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the 40-year-old case of his murdered niece, Harriet. The circumstances of the day—a family reunion/company board meeting on a private island, the bridge to which was cut off by an automobile accident—means that Harriet was murdered by one of her own family members, all of whom lead reclusive lives on the island’s various houses. All of the family members appear unbalanced, some of them were Nazi sympathizers during the war. The mystery, for all intents and purposes, seems indecipherable; Blomkvist has been hired to chase after ghosts at the edges of old photographs.

He is eventually assisted by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a damaged, abused young woman who, like Blomkvist, is an expert investigator, though she comes from an entirely different school of detection. Where Blomkvist relies on personal interviews and the old trick of posting suspect’s names on the wall, Salander is a search engine savant, an obsessive observer, and not entirely pleasant company. A ward of the state, Salander’s guardian suffers a stroke and is no longer able to handle her case. She is given over to Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), a sadistic bureaucrat who’ll only give Salander an allowance should she be willing to trade in sexual favors. These scenes are gross and horrifying in ways unrivaled by films whose sole purpose is to be gross and horrifying, and Salander’s revenge is appropriately brutal and torturous. More importantly, they give her the necessary motivation to join Blomkvist. She is a victim chasing an abuser, a woman capable of great violence hunting men who hate women unable to fight back.

The great success of this film, beyond Fincher’s obvious talent for style, is in the performances. Even at the end, when the movie is plodding through the detritus of the investigation that saw Blomkvist disgraced, Lisbeth Salander is a captivating human being. She lives in the margins of other people’s lives. It becomes obvious that she doesn’t always want things to be that way, but the big mystery, bigger still than the one on Henrik Vanger’s island, is how she’ll become something more than the fetishized object of men like Bjurman’s—even Blomkvist’s—desire. Blomkvist, indeed, seems currently incapable of looking at Salander as something more than object. She does her job well and one presumes he finds her enjoyable in bed, but his tastes run mundane (his editor-cum-mistress Erika (Robin Wright)) and, as a romantic interest, Salander’s a bit of a reclamation project.

The plot strands Salander and Blomkvist in a cottage on Vanger’s island, connected nominally to the mainland by a bridge but, in fact, worlds away from either person’s idea of normalcy. The Vangers, whose business ventures have faltered since the sudden disappearance of Harriet 40 years ago, are an odd assortment of shut-ins, misanthropes, and Nazis. Even the two nicest members of the family, Henrik and Martin (Stellan Skarsgård) don’t seem quite right, as their lifetimes of isolation and power have effectively knocked the family from orbit. Most of the people encountered by Salander and Blomkvist are evil or under the direction of evil people, and the Vangers are so varied, so rough, so unlikable, that it’s quite possible any one of them murdered Harriet.

That, ultimately, is the problem with the mystery at the heard of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: The film spends so much time obsessing on Salander, Blomkvist, and the minutiae they’re wading  in that much of the plot carries itself out, a precision timepiece ticking away in the background. On its own, the Vanger plot is engrossing material, one of a couple of plotlines that probably could have sustained its own film. While it’s effectively juggled, for the most part, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nevertheless guilty of some wonky storytelling, if only because it is so taken with its leads. There’s good reason for all that, not the least of which being that the movie doesn’t take many liberties with the original plot. It’s just that I can’t imagine antagonists much more brooding and mysterious than the Vangers, and their coming and going in one film seems all too easy, even if their purpose is to prove our heroes capable. They are, and they’re worth returning to. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo effectively sets the table—I just hope what’s next justifies leaving the island.

Rating:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Directed by David Fincher. With Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger), and Robin Wright (Erika Berger). Released December 20th, 2011, by Columbia Pictures.

Movie Review: Up (2009)

I want to sit in on a Pixar pitch meeting, just to see how many people in the room think from the beginning that a premise like the one behind Up will end up being a great movie. I think a typical, rational person looks at the idea of an old man tying a bunch of balloons to his house so he can travel to South America as a minor entry in Pixar’s mostly stellar line-up. Lucky for us, Pixar doesn’t believe in minor work. Up, as mentioned, is about an old man (Carl, voiced by Ed Asner) who ties some balloons to his house so he can float to South America—specifically, to Paradise Falls, which he and his wife missed a flight to years before. The heart of Up is not the journey, but why Carl takes it so late in his life.

Before Carl sets off on his trip, we are given his motivation. As a kid, Carl was a big fan of Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an explorer who finds an incredibly rare skeleton at Paradise Falls that is believed to be a hoax. Disgraced, Muntz declares that the world will never see him again…unless he catches a living specimen. Carl sees all of this play out on the big screen, via newsreel.

On the way home from the theater, Carl hears noise coming from an abandoned house and decides to check it out. Inside, he meets Ellie (Elie Doctor), who, as fate would have it, becomes his wife. Then, in what might be the best ten minutes of animation this decade, Carl and Ellie grow old together and face the various realities of life. The segment plays out without dialog, instead choosing to use very strong, very human images to show the various heartbreaks and triumphs, large and small, that we all face.

But this is a movie about a man who flies his house.

And he does that, with the aid/hindrance of a young Wilderness Scout named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who is seeking out his last merit badge: Assisting the elderly. They make it to Paradise Falls, meet a talking dog, and have an adventure well beyond any you’d imagine the unlikely tag team of an old man and a young boy possible of having.

While I don’t want to spoil what happens after the house lands in South America, it involves Big Subjects for a kids movie. Those big subjects include loss, as Carl talks to an absent Ellie and literally drags their dream house behind him as he and Joseph trek to the falls, loneliness, which both Carl and Joseph experience, and being let down by your heroes. There is lighter fare, and plenty of it —the talking dog allows for some fun hypothesizing about dog psychology—but none of it is played for a cheap punchline.

Lurking somewhere out in Paradise Falls is Muntz, unseen since his last newsreel. After 70-something years in a jungle with only dogs and the rare poacher to keep him company, one wonders if there wasn’t something slightly maniacal just beneath the surface of his superheroic adventures, a need to be praised. I imagine the reaction he’d get upon his return to society would crush him. Maybe he’d get a stub on Wikipedia and a listing on the page for centenarians—a societal shrug of the shoulders, a minimization of his accomplishments. How many old newsreels do we have lying around, anyway?

If I had to guess at how old Carl is, I’d put him in his mid-70s, which may be generous considering the tennis ball muffled cane he walks with. That last sentence might be a bit ageist, and that may be what the movie is driving at by giving us a plot with an old protagonist, an older antagonist, and sidekicks who aren’t supergeniuses who spring to the rescue. For every grandfather who’s ever said “Do I have a story for you,” only to be ignored in favor of the Playstation, there are probably four or five really riveting stories about parachuting into some godawful machine gun nest in the thick of war. Below that, there might be more stories—first jobs, first kisses, hilariously drunken episodes—that go untold until they simply fade away. Last year, Gran Torino featured a smaller story about youth/elder bonding and picked up considerable Oscar buzz, if only because Clint Eastwood, an old man, kicked a whole lot of ass. Given its audience, this movie is more accessible, and maybe thus more important—who better to send this message to than kids?

The animation, as we’ve come to expect from most Pixar films, is excellent. Cartoonish though it may be, the animators are lavish with detail, from the curios on Carl’s mantle to the buttons on Russell’s sash, all the way to the spray at the bottom of Paradise Falls. No shortcuts are taken. I saw this movie in 2D, but the visuals still popped from the screen. I wonder how the colors compare once you throw on the glasses. I wonder if Carl’s huge nose constantly juts from the screen.

Pete Doctor, the director of Up, has been an integral part of Pixar’s success. Having been around since Pixar’s short animation days in 1988, he has been on the writing team of Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Wall-E, which he left to devote more time to this film. He was also the director of Monsters Inc., which, on the very surface level of things, seemed like such a simple project—a movie about the monsters in our closet. Maybe those pitch meetings start with a long discussion on what clichés they haven’t brought to the big screen.

Since The Incredibles, I have been hoping for more mature mainstream animation, movies that don’t treat children like insipid, sugar-addled idiots. After nose-diving with Cars, Pixar’s last three films have been tremendous, if overwhelmed by the presence of Dreamworks, who seem to release three fast paced, poorly written, celebrity voiced catchphrase-a-thons to Pixar’s one gem a year. While I don’t see the trend changing (Dreamworks’ upcoming slate is depressing), Pixar’s ability to take a seemingly harebrained plot and turn in a winner is heartening. If Toy Story 3, The Bear and the Bow, and newt are as good as this, I’ll forgive them Cars 2.

Rating:

Up. Directed by Pete Doctor. With Ed Asner (Carl), Christopher Plummer (Charles Muntz), and Jordan Nagai (Russell). Released May 29, 2009, by Walt Disney Pictures.

Movie Review: National Treasure (2004)

(Note: Most of the following was chopped out of a very long essay that I wrote for CAGEFEST, the Nic Cage Film Festival over at Blog Cabins. If you’re so inclined, you can go check it out here.)

National Treasure, the 2004 film starring Nicholas Cage, plays like a lot of globe-trotting adventure films in our post Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade world: Cage, as Benjamin Franklin Gates, is an adventurer, a ruthless cataloger of seemingly useless historical fact, and, after complicating their lives to a great degree, a hit with the women. The similarities to the Lucas/Spielberg franchise end there though, as Benjamin Gates is not apt to tomb raiding, fighting the supernatural, or fighting the bad guy. He prefers to outthink his opponent, not unlike the protagonist of The Da Vinci Code. Gates gets off all of two moves on offense: A poster tube to the forehead and a sock to the nose. This is Indiana Jones if poor Indy was locked in a library for two hours, forced to read about Freemasons and obscure trivia.

The movie: After a fair bit of family history (Gates’ great-great-great-grandfather was the confidant of the last signer of the Declaration of Independence, learns of a fat lot of treasure, is murdered for his knowledge), Ben Gates takes up his father’s, and grandfather’s, and great-grandfather’s, and great-great-grandfather’s, and great-great-great-grandfather’s charge: Finding enough clues to protect that treasure. After this great mucking-about of American history, we’re introduced to old Benjamin Gates, who is left with an ambiguous clue: “With Charlotte, the secret lies.” Six generations of the Gates family, and by gum, this one’s got a chance.

Nic Cage looks cool as fuck in a pair of sunglasses and a parka, while Sean Bean is forced to wear a mullet. Life, being unfair, continues to kick viewers in the nuts as we’re reminded that the Gates family is full of failure, and introduced to Ben’s annoying sidekick, Riley Poole (Justin Bartha). He handles seeing a frozen corpse well.

The secret does indeed lie with Charlotte, which is a boat frozen in the Arctic Circle. The ship, lost off the coast of Newfoundland in 1818, is found under mere inches of snow. No matter, because we’ve found clue #2, a riddle on the stem of a pretty badass pipe, pointing in the direction of the Declaration of Independence. Gates gets mighty upset at Ian Howe’s (Bean) suggestion that they “borrow” the Declaration of Independence. Turns out that Howe isn’t a good guy, so Gates refuses. The bad guys attempt to kill Gates, but the room goes up in smoke, everybody escapes, we have explosions and bad guys. I guess stealing the Declaration of Independence is evil, but not evil enough to alert the Feds.

So Gates and Riley go to the National Archives, where they meet Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), “a very cute man.” “That accent,” Gates says. “Pennsylvania Dutch?” Saxony German. That accent thing, usually a ticket to a girl’s pants, falls flat on its face. And really, a librarian? Willie Scott would probably win that fight. Ms. Chase doesn’t believe Gates either, especially when he brings up the map that’s supposedly on the back. Invisible ink, yo. After appealing to her taste in Presidents, Gates takes off, sad that he won’t get to apply heat to the Declaration’s lemon juice map. After reading the line about standing up to corruption, he decides that he’s the one who’ll steal the Declaration. It’s like stealing a national monument. It’s like stealing…a national treasure.

After discerning that it might just be possible to steal the Declaration, we’re given a typical Jerry Bruckheimer montage of technology and camera angles, and the heist is underway. Note the differences in ideology here: Gates is going for subtlety (you wouldn’t know this from his description of what would have happened to the forefathers had they lost), while Howe plans on blowing shit up to crunchy guitars. While Howe and co. blow things up, Gates puts a condom on his thumb to take the thumbprint of Ms. Chase from a champagne glass (a gala event is naturally happening at this time). Disaster strikes when Riley looses his video feed, so Gates takes the whole damn thing, disguises the Declaration as a poster, and makes off like a bandit in the night.

Almost. Chase follows Gates, security finds out that the Declaration is gone, Gates gives the thing back to Chase, who is intercepted by Howe, leading to a decent enough stunt sequence where Howe keeps calling the Declaration of Independence “the document.” Turns out, it’s a duplicate, so Gates still has it. Hurrah! A childish argument ensues, where Gates spells out his plan to Chase, who exclaims “That’s dumb!” which is swearing, according to Riley. Nic plays it super fucking cool here, pointing out calmly that there’s shouting and, hey man, this van is a place for friends.

Suddenly, a Harvey Keitel appears, and we get a 9/11 nod (“Several days ago, we received a tip…”), and the F.B.I. gets involved. So does Jon Voight, playing Benjamin’s dad, and we’re allowed to rest for awhile as papa Gates spins his stories about how the treasure is fake. He’s the family kook though, because he has a job, a house, and health insurance, unlike the other Gateses, who were unemployed, homeless, and susceptible to diseases. A montage and a bunch of lemon juice later, we’ve got a bunch of numbers, but they’re all important, as they lead to some letters. Clue #3. Papa Gates almost has a heart attack about the theft of the Declaration of Independence. Voight says the word “clue” for the 437th time in five minutes, and Ben is gone.

From there, the movie takes an hour to rush to its exciting conclusion. New clothes are purchased, codes are cracked, and clues upon clues upon clues are discovered! Howe remains hot on the trail, using Yahoo! search to crack codes. A pair of 3D glasses (invented by Ben Franklin) are found, and the trio take out the Declaration…IN PUBLIC. It’s an (*ahem*) cool moment, because “the last time this was here, it was being signed.” After Gates recovers from his orgasmic bliss, they get the next clue, survive a long foot chase, but lose “the document.” Oh, and Gates gets captured by the F.B.I.

I don’t want to spoil the end of the movie, but Ben gets to wear his cool 3D glasses again, and we go tomb raiding with the whole cast of characters. Gates macks on Chase out of nowhere, and the bad guys lose. Everybody returns for the sequel, minus Sean Bean, who, naturally, is the best part of this movie.

It’s not all bad though, really. The movie is a sort of mediocre popcorn flick that you see once or twice on USA Network (their ads for the movie show Voight saying “another clue and another clue and another clue” over and over) and forget about, other than the sometimes bad sometimes awful dialog and the just plain unnecessary cuts back and forth and back and forth. Cage and Bean salvage what they can from it, Keitel is Keitel, but otherwise? Not so good. I wasn’t much for the score, either, but when it comes to action-adventure epics, I’m a John Williams kinda guy.

Rating:

National Treasure. Directed by Jon Turteltaub. With Nicolas Cage (Benjamin Franklin Gates), Diane Kruger (Abigail Chase), Justin Bartha (Riley Poole), Sean Bean (Ian Howe), Jon Voight (Patrick Gates), Harvey Keitel (Sadusky), and Christopher Plummer (John Adams Gates). Released November 19, 2004, by Walt Disney Pictures.