The Social Network

Written at the time of the film's release...(although, here, outdated links have been deleted and more relevant ones have been inserted...and then, I'll post the thing on "Facebook"...which is so "Meta")

"Saving Facebook" ("Every Creation-Myth Needs a Devil")
or
"There's Somethin' Happenin' Here (What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear)"

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in't!" (The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1)

Maybe it is too early to make a movie about Facebook (out of MySpace and Friendster) and the ramifications of our Brave New World of cyber-relationships. Maybe it is a little too "street-corner sage" to predict The End of the World As We are Sorta Familiar With it (But Not Really...More Acquaintances, Really). But, it is interesting to see a story about the Frankenstein behind the Monster, if only to see how each reflects the other.

And even though we're secretly rooting for The Monster.

And, at this point in time, there isn't a better team to make The Social Network than Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher. Sorkin, the mad savant behind some of the better TV shows of the past decade and a half, has always written about people and their "issues," and how personality impacts policy. Fincher has matured from an ILM tech (who was happy to fly cameras through coffee-maker grips**) to an intricate observer of societal pressures on the psyche. For the two of them to make this particular story is a Friend Invitation made in Hollywood Heaven.  "Accept" it. But, you can't "Ignore" it.

The movie begins with a date going badly between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, late of many movies with "...land" in the title) Harvard wall-flower, and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara—she'll play Lisbeth Salander opposite Daniel Craig in Fincher's big-budget version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), an acquaintance. Anyone familiar with the machine-gun dialogue that writer Sorkin is known for, had better duck for cover—or wait for this on DVD so you can...play...it...slooooowly—for he now has an automatic weapon for a word-processor, and a co-conspirator in Eisenberg who can milk every nuance out of a line, despite hyperventilating it at debate-competition speed. His Zuckerberg is a "no Dolby/no squelch" type of unreadable conscience, and Eisenberg plays it with a deadness behind the eyes that interprets the world as a problem, if not necessarily a challenge. He's a bit too candid for a first date, and she stomps off, which sends him on a mission, simultaneously trashing her on his blog (LiveJournal) and culling the pictures of every woman on campus to create a "Who's Hotter" web-competition that becomes so popular so instantly that it crashes Harvard's web-infrastructure.

He becomes both famous and infamous for the stunt, guaranteeing he'll never get a date in college, and attracting the wrath of the college's board, and the interest of two preppies attempting to create an exclusionary social network on the web. He goes them several steps better, making a system open to everyone on campus that trumps their attempts, and as it gains "friends," expands throughout the college system.

Hindsight is 20/20, and Sorkin constructs the film as a series of depositions after the fact (of Facebook's success) as everyone who thinks they've been burned by Zuckerberg testifies to his vague promises and dealings under the table.*** Of course, they have every right to sue—but they'd only sue if "The Facebook" was a success—and the underpinnings and double-dealings don't resemble a fight for satisfaction, or a Noble Quest, so much as resembling a snake eating its own tail. ****

Which brings us back to Frankenstein and his Monster. The film itself is expertly done—it is a complicated story of hidden motivations and the presentation of masks before public faces—and Sorkin and Fincher manage to navigate us through the maze of the story, even though one feels there is no cheese at the end. The experience is a bit hollow, which may be a part of the point.

Because the Facebook experience is hollow, as well. As hollow as Zuckerberg, as portrayed in this film, is. While it is nice that one has the opportunity to "re-connect" with old friends in a virtual environment and satisfy everyone's need to (as one friend commented on blogging) "talk about what you had for lunch," one wonders why one has to re-connect at all...especially if the relationship wasn't maintained in the first place. Not enough time in the world to meet? Because a "real" relationship takes time, takes effort, "gets messy?" Facebook provides the illusion of "staying in touch," without actually touching. Like Zuckerberg's abortive "date," a lot of time is spent broadcasting, but not interacting.

There are, of course, exceptions. But the fact of the matter is Facebook's cyber-community is not a "Brave New World" at all. Just the opposite. It provides a substitute in lieu of commitment. A panacea in a life thought to be full to bursting and without risk. The most precious commodity we can give is time—slices of our lives and our selves. Facebook is a pacifier—a mass-Hallmark card that we can spend a few heart-beats picking out, and send away without a thought and not even sweat the cost of a stamp.

It soon becomes a numbers game—a collection, like the celebration of the 1,000,000th friend portrayed in the film. But who are those million people?  Facebook doesn't know or care. It's just a number. A number of casual relationships, that may lead to something else, but probably won't. A collection, nice to look at, but more often, ignored. Trophies, and ones that don't need to be polished or buffed up.

It's a new world of blithely arrested development, in the image of its creator, where love and commitment do not compute, and the only thing close to it is "hope"—translatable as keystroke F5.

* Except for some dodgy freezing breath-work, the biggest special effect will be invisible to you until the closing credits.  Nice.

** Personally, I'd like to get back all those hours spent on "ZooWorld."

*** An image that kept coming to mind every time I thought of writing this review, where it would subsequently be published...on B/C-L's's Facebook page.

Side Effects

This was written at the time of the film's release...

First, Do No Harm
or
Physician, Heal Thyself

One of my great joys in life is watching happy-pharm' commercials that spend ten of their thirty seconds extolling the virtues of their chemicals ("It stops your brain from telling you you're SAD!"), then the last 20 of them warning about all the dire side effects of said chemicals up to and including death (and maybe beyond).  That's comedy gold right there, masquerading as serious medical advice, wrapped in ad hucksterism.*

Now, prolific director Steve Soderbergh, who started his career twenty four years ago with Sex, Lies, and Videotape is saying he will end his commercial film career** with Side Effects, an odd mixing of genres that has as its basis all those little warnings for the mystery "miracle" pills that are being foisted on the public for the slightest of symptoms and moods, with the tentative approval of the FDA, and a library of law-suits, concerning their consequences on real human beings. In that way, it plays on a public's paranoia and trust of just what kind of human experiments might be being financed by the drug cartels, in much the same way as Hitchcock messed with our minds with our basic fears in his long career.  Soderbergh has never been this direct in his work before, making something akin to a traditional suspense-thriller, instead of a character study with sociological underpinnings (The Informant!,  Contagion, S, L, and V, Traffic) as we're used to from his previous work.

It's a pretty basic story, with some nicely diverting echoes of recent headlines: Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) works for a New York marketing agency and is dealing with a lot of stress in her life. Her husband (Channing Tatum) is being released from prison after four years for insider trading.  She's been struggling with these issues for awhile, and being treated for depression over the circumstances. But, once husband comes home, things take a turn for the worst.  

Or actually, don't take a turn—Emily drives her late-model car directly into a garage wall—rather than heading for the "Exit" arrow, she runs INTO the "Exit" arrow. 

She suffers a concussion and is taken to the hospital, where she comes under the watchful eye of Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) who knows exactly what's wrong by deducing "usually when someone hits a brick wall, there are skid marks." Emily doesn't want to be a bother, and bargains her way out of the E.R. by promising to visit Dr. Banks for therapy.

At this point, a responsible reviewer should say: "Warning: complications may occur, consult your physician." Let's just say "things get messy" and merely suggest that a nasty case of medical ethics can turn into...a really nasty case of all kinds of ethics. To say any more would spoil the bumpy ride the film provides, but one doesn't risk too much by sharing a particularly nifty exchange around which the whole film hinges: "Did the person do it? Are they guilty?" "In the present case, those are two very different things." Nice little piece of writing, that.

The screenwriter is Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote Contagion and The Informant!) and he's constructed a medical thriller that takes a few hairpin turns and manages to avoid the guardrails of audience expectations and movie cliches. And Soderbergh (who shot and edited the film) has cast it impeccably with folks he's worked with before: Law, who's usually fared better at smaller character parts, here finally shows he can carry off a "leading man" role, dominating the film, while making "normal" interesting; Catherine Zeta-Jones shows (again) how versatile she can be in a small but crucial role as a consulting shrink; Channing Tatum makes the most of his part as the husband caught up in a world that he's just re-entered but can't understand. And Soderbergh rookie Rooney Mara gives a complex performance that's more than a little unpredictable (not surprising, given her history of moving from a straight performance in The Social Network to anything-but in Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) looking like what you'd imagine Sandra Bullock's creepy little sister might look like, Mara convincingly pulls off mood shifts that might require an exorcist rather than a prescription.

Sorry...sorry. I shouldn't have used the word "creepy!"

In many ways, Side Effects is the film many expected last year's Flight to be: instead of a straight-forward look at addictions and their crises, a lot of viewers were expecting there to be some mystery that would neatly tie loose ends and vindicate its protagonist.  But, Side Effects plays with societal responsibility and legalities in a time when the very nature of people's natures is being altered, in the same way that Michael Crichton used to explore science's impacts on us in his books and films, provoking such tough questions and "Are we prepared for this?" "Just because we can do this, should we, and how will we deal with the fall-out?"

In any case, in the theater or after-movie discussions, Side Effects will not cause drowsiness.

Jude Law learns his practice isn't perfect in Side Effects

* SNL did a fine parody of this type of advertising with a fictional toy-product, the generically-labelled "Happy Fun Ball:"

**  We'll see how long that lasts, but Soderbergh has long grated against turning out commercial product (the one-two punch last year of Haywire and Magic Mike, notwithstanding) for the sake of commercial product, wanting to experiment with non-box-officey topics and distribution avenues. 

2024 Update: Yeah, he shows no signs of stopping—Presence is coming out this year and after that, a project called Blackbag.

Women Talking

Only Women Bleed

or

...Then What's a Heaven For?
 

"The Following is a Product of Female Imagination" says the title once the opening narration of Women Talking is finished—opening line: "This all happened before you were born"—and it's a bitterly defiant statement as we've just learned that the women of a Mennonite colony--who are being systematically drugged with cattle tranquilizers, raped, beaten and often impregnated--have been chastised by the men of the colony that their accusations are hysterical, or that they're being visited by ghosts or demons or that it is all a product of "wild female imagination," and holds no truth in reality. Their reality.

 

"Wild female imagination." "Female Imagination" does not bruise and it cannot make pregnant. Men do that in their male imaginations and plots. Because they can. Because they think they can get away with it. Because they can't do it any other way. Because they're allowed to get away with it. Because their authority can't be questioned.

 

And because accusing the men of it (they say, because it's "their colony") will mean that the women won't be able to go to Heaven for their "lies." The men, presumably will, because there's nothing in The Ten Commandments about hypocrisy.

The men have now gone into the neighboring town to try and make bail for the accused attackers. They will be gone for more than a day, and, when they return, the women are expected to apologize...and if they don't recant, they will face excommunication and, of course, not be able to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.

So, while the men are gone, the women take a vote—their first—and because they are prohibited from learning to read or write, It's done with pictographs and X's. 

There are three choices. Stay and Submit. Stay and Fight. Flee. Leave the colony.

The vote is split between "Stay and Fight" and "Leave the colony" and so, the women choose representatives to discuss what will be done, the ramifications, the logistics, what will come next. And to keep a record of their discussion, they recruit the one male left behind, August (Ben Whishaw)—whose family was excommunicated due to his mother's objections to the men's dictates—to record the minutes of their meeting, a record to be left behind.

Three generations of women discuss what comes next: elders Agata (Judith Ivey), Janz (Frances McDormand), and Greta (Sheila McCarthy), daughters Ona (Rooney Mara), pregnant with the child of her attacker, Mariche (Jessie Buckley) and her children, and Salome (Claire Foy) all gather in a barn-loft to discuss their options and make the decisions before the men-folk come back. They know the situation is intolerable—although Jenz decides that she will stay and leaves the discussions early—and they have to decide what sort of life they want for themselves. And for their children, who are also subject to the men's attacks—the most recent attack was on Salome's four year old daughter.

It's a particularly appropriate time to have movies like this, as women's autonomy is under attack in this country and throughout the world (it's why the recent adaptation of "The Handmaid's Tale" recently resonated so much in the collective zeitgeist—while the 1990 film of it couldn't make its costs back—and as the #MeToo movement exposed the pervasive inequities in the power structures as women cemented their places in the workplace and in government). The only way to fight the entrenched power structure is in an organized group-dynamic that can up-end the status quo and maybe drown it out.

Women organizing and re-asserting power is as old as "Lysistrata," but writer-director Sarah Polley (Away From Her and Stories We Tell), has other things to discuss in Women Talking besides Fight or Flight. Good Lord, one of these days the Library is going to have a "Revenge" genre in their DVD selections, and that easy solution is dissected and vivisected in the course of the movie, because some of the women just want revenge. This multi-generational congress weighs options based on need, principals, philosophies, and viable futures...which includes going to heaven. In a way, it is it's own version of Twelve Angry Men—call it Eleven Angry Women—where prejudices are revealed, motivations are explained, and minds are changed. And it's performed by some of the best and subtle actors in the field.

If there's a complaint, it's that the introduction is a little rushed, some of the circumstances of the women involved not made clear from the outset, leaving an audience-member confused rather than intrigued. And Polley desaturates her images so far into the gray scale that it could almost be black-and-white. As some directors (Welles and Bogdanovich and Ford) have pointed out, sometimes color can be just too pretty for what you're trying to convey and the film-matter, though set on acres of fields is far from verdant. The film is a tough-sell, anyway, perhaps the distributors insisted on a color film, and this was Polley's solution.

And for anyone who grouses that the film is any sort of "stretch" it's based on a book that took as its inspiration, what was called "The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia," where, beginning in 2005, women in a colony began to be subjected to this type of outrage and decided to leave, trusting in God that She would provide.

Nightmare Alley (2021)

The Smartest Man in the Room

or

"...It's All Geek To Me"

 

We meet Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) in the middle of committing a crime; in a soon-to-be-abandoned house, he drags a body to a waiting hole in the floor-boards, strikes a match—we see a gas-can on the floor behind him—and sets the room and the clapboard structure on fire. Then he simply walks away, next stop...anywhere, U.S.A.

 

It's a bus-ride to where he's going. And he gets off at the designated restaurant, but he moves on to the glowing lights of a carnival, drawn to it like a moth to a flame. He moves over to a structure blanketed with "'Odd'-i-torium" and he goes in; for a quarter, he can see "The Geek" described by carny boss Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) as a "supreme oddity—is he man of beast?" And as the slack-jawed crowd of curious gawkers gathers around a small arena, "The Geek," mangy and disheveled, is let out of his cage and thrown a live chicken which he bites in the neck and tears its head off. Repulsed, Stan leaves but is followed by Hoatley: "What's your pitch, pal? You on the low?" 

Within ten minutes Carlisle is hired as a roustabout, and one of his jobs is to round up the geek when he escapes his cage. Stan is sent in through the demonically-themed fun-house, it's signs warning of damnation and sees the geek, cowering. Ignoring Hoatley's advice, he tries to entice the man on his own and ends up getting concussed by a brick. Before any more damage can be done, he's found, the geek trussed up and Hoatley, fearing repercussions, offers him a steady job with the carnival. At night, he dreams dreams of flames, but in the morning, he helps fold up the tent and move on with the show—they're meeting up with another troupe down the road.

The spot they stop is a lot with an already-established carnival and across the dirt road is the house of Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and her husband, Pete (David Strathairn), a once very successful mentalist act, gone on to hard times because of Zeena's philandering and Pete taking to drink. There is still talent in the older gentleman, but his will is broken, but he sees talent in the young man who's come to the house with the newly-arrived vagandonds and wants a bath. Zeena sees something in him, too, and seduces him—not that it takes much—and reads his fortune with her Tarot cards and it's ominous. Carlisle doesn't believe in such nonsense, not believing in fate, but only in the weakness he notices in others. He thinks he'll do very well.

If you've seen the 1947 version, you'll recognize a lot of what's going on as gone before. Watching this version of Nightmare Alley, though, evokes the same feeling one had when watching Martin Scorsese's version of Cape Fear after having seen the original.  It's the same story, but in another location, one steeped in the obsessions of the director. Where the first story was done to get the material down, the new one is richer, more grandiose, and more nuanced. No one's worried about time or hurrying the scene along. There is so much detail that to have it go any faster would be to miss something. The screenplay—by director Guillermo del Toro and his wife Kim Morgan—author of the "Sunset Gun" blog—is based on the original novel by William Lindsay Gresham, not on the original's screenplay by Howard Hawks scribe Jules Furthman. As such, it's a bit more "on the nose" and spells things out, announcing its themes and intentions so that no one misses the point. Rather than hurting the movie, it only gives it more depth, as the story can take the weight.

The casting is top-notch in the way the original couldn't be—there everyone was attractive—and populated by character actors of great depth. Cooper is Tyrone Power handsome, but he has a boyish "something" that makes him attractive—a kid in a man's body. Rooney Mara plays Molly, who is far more waif-like, but still evokes an inner strength and del Toro veteran Ron Perlman plays her guardian, Bruno, the carnival strong-man. Collette and Strathairn are both studies in washed-up talent, resigned to their fates but capable of showing glimpses of their glory days, and as Dr. Lilith Ritter, a fellow con artist as psychiatrist, Cate Blanchett risks parody by playing a creature of constantly challenging seduction, as if Lauren Bacall was playing a villain. 

This is something of a first for del Toro, who leaves behind the monsters' realm (temporarily, I assume), even while keeping one separated foot planted firmly in the grotesque. It's not his usual genre, as it's not a horror movie (and hewing closer to noir), but it flirts with it, the way that Carlisle will flirt with the mystical and the spiritual when he thinks using mentalist tricks isn't enough of a high-stakes racket for him. Because it's not enough to play tricks on people, to "read" them and use it against them, convince them that you have a power that they don't have. It's an endlessly escalating mind-game for both players. But, the hubris that results can make the fall from great heights higher than it appears. 

And Carlisle is just a beginner. He's not a mind-reader. He's a weakness-reader. A need-reader. It would have been better if he'd learned the tarot, so he could learn the future, but even when he's told what it is, even when it's spelled out in so much detail, he doesn't believe it. And maybe that has something to do with control. The future isn't written; he has no way to sway it. No way to read it, like the past on a man's face. And he's as much a paying customer—a rube—as anybody else is when it comes to Fate.

And that just doesn't cut it for the smartest man in the room, the man who knows everything about everybody. 

 

Except himself. Except that he's not as smart as he thinks he is.

 

It's a cautionary tale, as so much of film noir is. And it's one people should listen to.

 

A Ghost Story (2017)

A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017) One of the new breed of directors that I go out of my way to watch is David Lowery. The first film I saw of his, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, was a subtle variation of Bonnie and Clyde with a streak of altruism running through its cynicism. Then, of all things, he took on a live version of a Disney movie—one of its worst, Pete's Dragon—and turned a torturous musical into a simple, song-less Shaggy Dragon story with a genuine sense of wonder. A Ghost Story came next, but like a phantasm, disappeared quickly from theaters—*poof* Next up was The Old Man and the Gun, a story almost too good to be true—except it mostly was—and showed that Lowery was easing off the pictorial precision and giving his performers room to breathe without making them look like they were in an art painting. The constraints—like the performers—were relaxed and no less satisfying for it. 

But, A Ghost Story. What of that?

A recent viewing on Netflix shows it to be the simplest of tales, but what Lowery does with it—with one painterly eye and the other winking—makes for one of those movies you want to discuss after its un-spooled and is flapping against the projector...and you're still in your seat (while the theater clean-up crew give you a wary glance). 

Nobody has any names in the movie—the two main folks are C (played by Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), a married couple, slightly fracturing, but still together and still in love with each other. He's a musician when he's not doing other things and she's doing other things. They are childless and one would say rootless, except that one of their areas of contention is that she wants to move and he doesn't. In the opening, there are unexplained things that happen in the house—the piano makes a thump in the middle of the night and a wary nighttime exploration reveals nothing. The house subject to areas of shimmering color that have no seeable origin.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. But, so does death. C is killed in an auto accident on the street outside their house. M goes to the hospital to identify the body, and does so. She leaves. 

Long pause on the same angle of the shot of the body on the examination table. Very long pause. And the sheet on the slab sits up. Looks around. The next shot is of a hospital wall with a sink prominent, center-stage, and we see the reflection of the sheet-swathed C approaching screen-right before we see the "real" thing crossing our field of vision.

The "real" thing is a figure in a head-to-floor sheet with cut-out eyes, like a child's home-made Hallowe'en ghost costume. Maybe it's a cost-cutting move to present the main character, appearing in virtually (spiritually?) the entire movie, as a practical costume rather than creating a feature-length digital effect. But, the effect is so simple, so cheery, and so...eerie (especially as Lowery presents it) that one warms to the conceit and "just goes with it," as opposed to grousing about a "cheap effect"—especially when it's Affleck giving the physical performance under the sheet.

C's ghost, wandering around the hospital, has an opportunity to "go to the light"—in a sequence that has the same animated feel of the time-portal appearances in Time Bandits—but does not. Instead, he goes home, back to the house he shared with M, observing the few comings and goings passively, even when the is the threat—from his point of view—of her becoming involved with another man. This isn't A Guy Named Joe (or Spielberg's version Always) or even Ghost. C merely watches and doesn't (or can't) interact with the living, at least, not yet (there will be a time when he is responsible for some poltergeist activity later in the film). He is rooted in one spot and, by his own choice, remains there, even after M has packed off and left, leaving an embedded note in the house's drywall that, once he's able to manifest himself enough to interact with the "real" world, he tries to retrieve. It will take years. 

Until another family moves in to the house—one of a few—his only contact is another ghost, inhabiting the house next door and who waves from one of its windows. Their communication, rather wittily supplied in sub-titles, concerns the basics ("Hi." "Hello." "I'm waiting for someone." "Who are you waiting for?" "I don't know.") It is only once the houses are abandoned and razed, does the other ghost say "I don't think they're coming" and disappears, without another word.

But, C stays, never venturing from the spot where the foundation existed. Even after the suburb has become overtaken with urban development, he remains, finally inhabiting the office building that has risen up in the house's place. And it's here that the film starts to become a bit phantasmagorical as C's "stay-in-place" journey becomes more identifiable as one of time and not place.

I eat this kind of movie like a fine continental breakfast, the kind of film that tells its story through image more than dialogue. Mostly silent—there is a wonderfully mordant score by Daniel Hart—the film plays out like the "Zarathustrian apartment" sequence towards the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey; things happen and it's the viewer's job to keep up with the changes without a narrative hand-holding strategem. One should keep in mind that literal-mindedness may not be an asset—the film is dealing with the after-life, after all, and rules don't necessarily apply in that dimension. It is a journey, but its not one anybody alive enough to watch the film could be able to argue with.

Shot in the claustrophobic aspect ratio of 1.33:1—the old "Academy" ratio, that was jettisoned when wide-screen started to be introduced—A Ghost Story is a simple story, well-told, beautiful to look at, and leaves one pondering what one has just seen and marveling at how such a thing has come to be.

It has an amazing after-life.

The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)(2015)

Written at the times of the films' releases...

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...Spy"

Investigative reporter Mikael Blomqvist (a nom de plume purloined from the fictional detective Kalle Blomqvist) has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a powerful Swiss industrialist. In six months he's set for the barry hotel, but in the meantime, he has down-time. He gets an invitation for a job—the coldest of cases, literally and metaphorically—on the remote wintry island that serves as a compound for the Vanger family.

The Vangers are the Swiss cousins of all the encrusted old-money families of British and American detective fiction. Be they Baskervilles or Armstrongs or Sternwoods, the "storied" elite families stood in for the Rothschilds and Lindberghs and Morgans and Rockefellers in a literary class warfare that assured the punters that bad things happened to the rich, as well. In fact, it was more than likely to happen to them as money is the root of all things evil. Perhaps.

Money was on the family's mind that Children's Day weekend on the Island, as a family board meeting was taking place, when one of the daughters disappeared, and her father drowned in a boating accident. One of the patriarchs wants to know, finally, forty years after the fact, what happened to the girl, who killed her, and charges Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) with the task. 

For the disgraced newsie, it's a case of interviews and solitary visits to the caked-in-dust morgues of newspaper offices and libraries. But, though isolated on the Island, he's being watched, not only by the family, but by a security investigator who's hacked his computer.

She's Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,* a 22 year old full-time goth-punk chain-smoking, bisexual, PTSD'd borderline schizophrenic, sociopathic, fire-fixated security-investigator-computer-hacker...and part-time judge, jury and executioner. And where Mikael is dusting off old store-rooms, she's mining hard-drives through the back-door for any information that might be useful, like, say, on the creep who's been appointed her guardian. Life has rumpled Mikael, but it's deeply scarred Lisbeth, and the two tarnished angels are linked by more than cyberspace in a mutual interest making peoples' forgotten pasts their field of play.

They were made for each other, and, as both are incapable of seeing a mystery without inserting themselves, fated to team up to solve the question, if it is to be solved.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of those whodunnit's much in love with every squeaking trope, and dangling aringarosa of the detective literary genre, and the puzzle is of the classic "Closed Room" variety—a traffic accident cut off the one exit to the bridge when the skull-duggery happened, so the scope of the search is limited to who might have been on that island to perpetrate it. The clues are varied in sources and nature, an old diary the girl kept with no entries that might lend suspicion, the few photographs taken that week-end...and Blomkvist's own memories—the girl was his nanny on Island holidays—provide nagging evidence, as does a single portrait that haunts him, like the Mona Lisa.

There are so many referrals to past films noir and sleuth-cinema that one could get lost in many a blind-alley (not that there are many on a rural Swedish island), but there are more than enough cousins and butlers and drawing rooms to go around—as with the best mysteries, no one is a suspect, but everyone is.

It is violent—there are two upsetting rape scenes that are essential to the plot, ultimately—but there is a cross-running sub-theme of sexual tyranny equating male sexism and domination as a form of fascism (it's an in-bred cousin to the feminism issues that made The Silence of the Lambs more important than a "boogey-man" story) that makes the film interesting philosophically in the genre. Director Niels Arden Oplev stages those scenes in a brutal manner that divorces them from any sexual act and makes them sadistic acts of violence, but one should be warned that there is rough stuff, far beyond cloak-room murders and high tea. The film is unrated, but consider it a hard "R." 

It's a cracking pastiche, with the best thing about it being the (English version's) titular character. A product of the very brutality embodied by the mystery itself, the stakes are personal for Salander (and Blomkvist, certainly), but, like the Hannibal Lecter character in Silence of the Lambs, she is such a wild-cannon on deck during the proceedings that her motivations keep your thinking cap distracted from the mystery at hand. As played by Rapace, she is a kabuki-like presence than can turn ninja on a dime, a literal smoking gun, who can make things better or worse, depending on her buried mood, making the film categorical as "Suspense" as well as "Mystery."

The other films in the trilogy will be released later in the year. Then, an American remake is planned...at this writing starring Brad Pitt and Carey Mulligan.

(Yeah, well, not so much...see below)

* That's what it is known as in English-speaking publishing circles where mysteries series need a unifying "hook" like John D. McDonald's colorful titles for the Travis McGee novels, or "Cat" series of Lilian Jackson Braun. In its native Sweden, the title—"Män som hatar kvinnor "— translates to the more straight-forward and to-the-point, "Men Who Hate Women." The popular series of novels, dubbed the "Millennium Trilogy" (for the publication Blomqvist works for) stopped at three due to the untimely death of its reporter/author Stieg Larsson of a heart attack at age 50, before the first could be published.

Michael Nykvist, who starred in the Swedish films, died June 27, 2017

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"The Girl With the Dragon, Take Two"
or
"Once More...with Feeling"

"We come from the land of the ice and snow
from the midnight sun where the hot springs FLOW
How soft your fields so green,
can whisper tales of gore,
Of how we calmed the tides of war.
We are your overlords.
On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore."

"Immigrant Song"  Led Zeppelin

The American production of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo advertised itself (amusingly) with the tag-line "The Feel Bad Movie for Christmas."  Compared to the Swedish-TV version (with Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace), it's actually, if one can believe it given the subject matter, a "kinder, gentler" version.

So, what's different?  For those familiar with the first version, many of the locations reveal themselves to be the same. Resolutions are slightly different. The casting certainly is (and more on that later). Editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall keep things moving very fast, sometimes abruptly, and scripter Steven Zaillian delivers punchy dialogue dripping with icyclic irony, while keeping the circumstances equally savage and shocking (what else can you expect from from a murder mystery involving in-bred families crusty with krona, corruption, Nazi affiliations, serial killers, sexual violence and "men who hate women"—the original title of the book when published in Sweden?). 

It's how director David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network) approaches the tone that's slightly different, and though still mordantly frigid, this version is a bit more clever in presentation, adding a darkly humorous slant. Sure, the violence is still sickening, but blunted, even handled at times more discretely, making the impact contrarily even more squeamy, while, at the same time, counter-pointing with sly musical choices.*

But, it's the casting where the main differences occur. Daniel Craig, no less intense, but muted and reduced to human scale with a world-weary familiarity, plays Mikael Blomqvist, co-publisher and chief reporter for an investigative magazine, Millennium. Disgraced by a libel suit gone against him and to shake off the publicity and the hit to his reputation and bank account, he takes on a murder investigation for the patriarch of the industrialist Wanger family (Christopher Plummer)—a literal cold case of the forty year old disappearance of the elder Wanger's granddaughter, although distinctive clues point to her either being alive, or the killer is cleverly taunting the old man.

It's soon clear that Blomqvist may be over his head and he calls on an "assistant"—the same background investigator who cleared him for the job for the Wangers. She's the titular "girl with the dragon tattoo"—Elisabeth Salander and "she's different."  "In what way?" asks Wanger's lawyer, Frode (Steven Berkoff).

"In every way," says her employer.

Too true, not only in terms of Society, but also from the actress who previously took the role (Noomi Rapace, currently starring in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows).  She's still the same Salander, the goth-punk, vegan, pierced, bi-sexual hacker-savant who becomes the focus of the series, zipping around the bleak Swedish countryside on her black-on-black motorcycle, but this movies version, in the form of Rooney Mara, is slight (she had to be starring opposite the 5'10" Craig), tiny and even more startling in appearance than Rapace.

There's still the same shock of hair, but with her elfin face, shaved eyebrows and eyes sunk deep into her face, she has the appearance of the walking dead, her head looking often like a skull, and speaking in a dull, listless monotone.  Rapace looked like she could kick serious ass (and did in the Swedish productions), but Mara is deceptively tiny, even looking sickly frail, so when she goes on the attack, it's doubly alarming. 

We learn more about the little spit-fire in the second and third books of the series (hopefully they'll have their own versions with this cast—as with the Swedish films—because this cast is too good to waste, but the film's poor box-office showing—"The Feel-Bad Movie of Christmas," remember?—may make that unlikely), but Mara's dead-inside interpretation, that only slightly blossoms through the film, is an interesting take, doubly tragic, keenly felt and puts both her character and Blomqvist's into an interesting perspective.

I actually like this version better than the first.

The main title with the Trent Reznor/Karen O version of the Led Zep song.

* The best being what was used in the initial trailers—Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," subtly adapted by producer-composer Trent Reznor (the perfect guy to score this film) for female vocal, while keeping the brutal orchestrations of the original intact.  The Main Title sequence accompanying it, is visually arresting, suggestive and creepy, almost a mission statement in tone—black and white, reflecting the film's dark muted color scheme—while suggesting minds, trapped, tortured and squirming like toads.