‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ delivers again and again

Noomi Rapace & Michael Nyqvist in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (2009) Yellow Bird, Nordisk Film

To say that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a gripping crime thriller really barely scratches the surface of what is really a sweeping work of fiction that  delivers an eye-opening look at how wealth and immorality corrupts and destroys a prominent family while at the same time condemning certain aspects of modern Swedish society.

Helmed by the relatively unknown Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  really does have it all―sex, violence, marital infidelity, political intrigue, corporate corruption and of course numerous references to Sweden’s brief WWII experiment with Nazism.

The Girl with the Dragon  is based on Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular “Millennium series” of novels which were released shortly after his death in 2004.

All three novels in the series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) dissect the underbelly of 21st century Swedish society while the stark beauty of the Sweden’s countryside provides a naturally dramatic backdrop.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is an investigative journalist who loses a libel case involving a wealthy but corrupt businessman named Hans-Erik Wennerström (Stefan Sauk).

Despite being sentenced to three months in prison and ordered to pay thousands in damages, Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of Vanger Corporation, to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet.

Because Harriet has been gone so long, Henrik rationalizes that Harriet was murdered yet each year on his birthday he receives gifts of pressed flowers leading him to suspect that either it’s a joke from the killer or Harriet is still alive.

It’s no secret that Henrik deeply despises his family which only further muddies the waters of potential suspects.

“For all intensive purposes the Vanger family was made up of a thoroughly unpleasant bunch and there was a mutual hatred among us,” Vanger tells Mikael.

Girl takes place around Christmas time but there is anything but cheer and tidings of joy.

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is a surveillance agent/computer hacker initially hired by Vanger’s lawyer to investigate Blomkvist but she believes Mikael has been set up and eventually is arm-twisted into joining his investigation into Harriet’s disappearance.

Rapace’s portrayal of the rakish, antisocial Lisbeth is brutally ice-cold yet brilliantly believable and consistent throughout the entire 152-minute film.

When Lisbeth is assaulted by a group of thugs in the subway, she manages to fight them off with a broken bottle.

And when her guardian/probation officer Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) threatens to withhold money from her unless she performs sexual favors, she frames him by secretly videotaping her own rape.

 

Peter Andersson & Noomi Rapace (2009) Yellow Bird, Nordisk Film

                                                                                                                                

Like most modern films, product placement rears its ugly head in the form of prominent placement of Apple laptops.

But that’s not really as annoying as how it seems every time a computer is hacked, the screen displays “ACCESS GRANTED” as if that needs to be spelled out every time.

Still, Girl has returned nearly $105 million in box office which might explain why American production companies caught a whiff and decided to remake a 2011 version directed by David Fincher and starring the latest “Bond” muse Daniel Craig.

I’m also not sure how Daniel Craig, more known for his action roles, will come across as an investigative journalist although he does have an uncanny resemblance to Michael Nyqvist.

What really sets the Swedish version apart from its inevitable American clone is that in this version, the music and dialog are consistent throughout the film.

Absent is the typical American penchant whereby inaudible dialogue is followed by ear-shattering audio simply for dramatic emphasis.

The astonishing climax is reached through steady and surefooted building of plot points in a way any adult would appreciate because the editing in Girl is methodical and mature without being boring.

Early theatrical promotions for the David Fincher-helmed Girl made it seem like the film would be the next great MTV music video rather than a high-quality dramatic thriller which this film is supposed to be.

It is said that imitation is the best form of flattery but in this case you’re probably better off seeing the original.—Steve Santiago

   

Contagion a flick without a cure

Contagion (2011) Warner Bros. Pictures, Participant Media, Imagenation

With an all-star cast and people like writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Informant!), one would expect director Steven Soderbergh (Sex,Lies, and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, Traffic) to knock one out of the park with his latest fare Contagion, a film about the ease at which pandemics can spread in an age when international travel is within the reach of millions.

The problem with Contagion though isn’t with an unknown superbug, it’s more that it’s a lumbering hulk of a movie that would have played much better as a public service announcement about what people should be doing in their everyday lives as a matter of basic hygiene—covering your mouth when sneezing, washing hands often, etc…

Despite its popularity with many critics and its tagline: “Nothing spreads like fear,” (which is probably what’s compelling audiences to see it) Contagion comes off as fresh only to those who’ve never heard of the History Channel and the numerous times this plot has been featured ad nauseam on shows about natural disasters and hypothetical pandemics.

And even though Contagion is packed with a literal who’s who of stars—Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet—it makes very little use of the talent on hand and delivers even less in the form of character development.

Beth Emhoff (Paltrow) succumbs first to the virus after having travelled to Asia but not before stopping off in Chicago for a quickie with an ex-boyfriend who also gets sick and ends up dying.

Poetic justice? Maybe.

In a bid to keep his sanity (while society unravels and after losing his wife and son to the virus), Mitch Emhoff (Damon) alternates between standing on line for MREs (meals ready to eat) and peeling his daughter’s (Anna Jacoby-Heron) horny boyfriend off of her all while planning his great escape to Wisconsin of all places.

Meanwhile, a stone-faced Dr. Ellis Cheever (Fishburne) icily admits “we have a virus with no treatment protocol, and no vaccine at this time” but is more preoccupied with evacuating his healthy wife Aubrey (Sanaa Lathan) than he is with his top field investigator, Dr. Erin Mears (Winslet) who after contracting the virus is unceremoniously buried outside a hockey arena in a mass grave.

On the other side of the planet, World Health Organization official, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Cotillard) is surreptitiously held hostage by Asian villagers while mega-blogger Alan Krumwiede (Law) sips forsythia tea and wanders around London wearing a jerry-rigged hazmat helmet that looks as if it were made from the plastic covering found on some sofas.

This is the kind of film that makes me wish I owned stock in a hand sanitizer company.

Still, Contagion manages to cough up (insert laugh track here) a couple of fine performances mainly from Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould, yes that Elliott Gould from MASH) who reminds Krumwiede that “Blogging is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation” and Sanjay Gupta who plays himself.—Steve Santiago

Old debts sometimes better than new ones

"The Debt", (2007), Evanstone Films Ltd.

It seems as Hollywood continues to exhaust its pipeline of creative ideas for movies, it simply resorts to remaking foreign cinema  that it hopes will be more palatable to American audiences.

I’m not a big fan of Hollywood remakes of foreign films and the current remake of 2007’s “The Debt” is no exception.

For one, domestic remakes sometimes tend to run longer—the new “Debt” runs almost two hours as opposed to the original which runs a leaner 90 minutes.

Two, remaking a high-quality work of art is like saying you can make fine French champagne at home simply because you use the same ingredients and have a cool cellar to store it in.

“Ha-Hov,”—”The Debt” as it is known in English—is and Israeli spy thriller told in Hebrew and German which opened November 2007 to critical acclaim in Israel.

Written and directed by Assaf Bernstein, it stars Gila Almagor (as the retired Rachel Brener), Edgar Selge (Max Reiner), Itay Tiran (young Zvi), Yehezkel Lazarov (young Ehud) and Netta Garti (as young Rachel Brener).

The film opens in 1964 as Rachel, Zvi and Ehud, three young Mossad agents, return to a hero’s welcome in Israel after claiming they dispatched Max Reiner, the notorious Surgeon of Birkenau.

Unbeknownst to everyone except the agents, the story is a fabrication as Reiner managed to escape the agents’ safe house but not before laying a beat down on two of the agents—Rachel winds up getting slashed in the face and Zvi comes home with his arm in a sling.

Flash forward 35 years and the mission is considered a high point in Mossad history until Reiner’s name turns up in a newspaper article.

It seems that ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’ is not only alive but living well in an upscale Ukrainian nursing home.

Meanwhile, a retired Rachel has been keeping herself busy training new Mossad agents and authoring a book about the now famous mission which turns out is a complete farce.

Later when confronted by Zvi to finish the mission, Rachel refuses until Zvi reminds her, “What do you remember each time you see this (her) scar?”

He insists that Rachel be the one to dispatch Reiner before anyone finds out he is still alive.

At a cocktail party celebrating her new book, she goes for more champagne only to cut her hand on a glass and flashes back to the 1960s mission.

Apparently, the post-war period has been very kind to Herr Doktor who has now set himself up as a well-to-do gynecologist adept at using his speculum—what else would a former Nazi doctor do for a living?

Rachel Brener (Neta Garty) poses as a young married patient of the doctor who is trying to get pregnant.

With each appointment, she recoils in fear knowing the atrocities committed by her physician.

And Reiner’s arctic-like bedside manner doesn’t make it any easier as he icily stares at her and repeats, “This is my hand, and this is the speculum.”

The suspicious doctor also asks Rachel who referred her to him after detecting that her German accent sounded foreign.

“The war changed a lot of people,” Reiner flatly states both referring to his innocent victims and his new found success as an ObGyn.

The plan to smuggle Reiner back to Israel to stand trial gets derailed after he gets his hands on a razor and escapes the safe house.

Despite its subject matter, The Israeli version of “The Debt” is a breath of fresh air and features a new way of storytelling from an otherwise not well-known national cinema.

Other than “Ajami”(2009),”Waltz with Bashir”(2008), “The Delta Force” (1986), “Iron Eagle” (1986) and maybe a few others, Israeli films have largely been absent from American theaters except maybe for a few art houses in large cities.

If you want a longer movie featuring more gunfire, faster-paced music, Dame Helen Mirren and faster cutting, then see the American version of this film.

Otherwise, stick with the slightly older, more satisfying “Debt.”―Steve Santiago