The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

There is probably no chore as thankless as directing the easier-to-digest, American adaptation of a recently successful foreign film. The man for the job this time seems to have been chosen by default; who would bring us a serial killer mystery investigated by societal persona non grata other than David Fincher? Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, previously brought to the screen in 2009 by Niels Arden Oplev, seems to be the perfect storm of Fincherian elements. Like his breakthrough Se7en, it takes place in a world sheathed in leather and populated by sociopaths with ink-black pupils. As with Zodiac, the drama lies in the collection of evidence held in archives untouched for years. And the outcast status of its protagonists, along with their intimate relationship to their computers, speaks to the same sort of dissociation from the world seen in The Social Network. Indeed, if there must be an American adaptation of Dragon Tattoo (and clearly there must), David Fincher seems fated to push the boulder up the slope.

Someone is terrorizing Henrik Wanger (Christopher Plummer) and has been for years, sending mementoes of his grandniece, mysteriously murdered in 1967. To "settle his accounts" once and for all he invites disgraced journalist Mikael Blomquist (Daniel Craig)  to his family's private island, where he informs him a Wanger, and only a Wanger, must be responsible for the crime (spoiler alert: one of the nice Nordics is played by Stellan Skarsgaard!). In Stockholm, a more unconventional investigator, the mohawked, bisexual Lisbeth Salander, struggles with a nasty civil servant over the inheritance left by her legal guardian. At the outset, the material speaks very loudly, the two characters violated as personally as possible with respect to their genders; Blomquist has lost his reputation and his livelihood, Salander her privacy and physical safety.

All bad adaptations are alike - they defer to the checklist of demands submitted by those who have read the book rather than pacing the story for the theater audience. Dragon Tattoo takes its place next to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Cider House Rules in this respect, filling its 158-minute running time with jagged edges of detail and red herring characters that do nothing but make us squirm in our seats. In making everything just so with it's printed forebearer, the film keeps Blomquist and Salander in separate boxes for well over an hour.

This is especially detrimental given the way the story has been thematically altered for our democratic sensibilities. Oplev and Larsson before him conceived of Dragon Tattoo as a feminist revenge fantasy - of course in Sweden a serial killer hunting women is slightly more virgin narrative territory than in the States. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood sees it as an unlikely buddy movie / romance; the poor girl just needs a bit of attention from a rough hewn individualist such as Blomquist to "get with the program". Working at cross purposes to this project is another characteristically leaden performance by Daniel Craig - it's far easier to relate to the misanthrope with the stun gun. This iteration of Dragon Tattoo is a meet-cute; not quite Hepburn and Tracy, but we're clearly meant to grin. So much for that subarctic chill.

However, Fincher does not intend to go down without a fight. He makes his presence felt from the outset, in a credit sequence that feels like nothing except liquid asphalt melting the gyrating bodies normally found at the opening of a James Bond film. Its not just the sexual violence that keeps him interested - he's at home whenever there are detailed files to be sifted through and highlighted. Fincher  favors precision and clinical distance over emotional awakening; Dragon Tattoo feels most his own when Mikael and Lisbeth are poring over more old photographs than are found in an Oliver Stone movie. However, there's little to connect the sins and mysteries of the past with the love story in the present. Plummer is magnetic as Wanger, but there's more screen time for Blomquist's numerous romantic and financial entanglements than the haunted patriarch that initiates the events of the story.

This unwavering respect for its source material ultimately renders The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo redux a rote excercise in plot delivery. Fincher has a keen understanding of human nature and a full arsenal of tools to bring those insights to the screen, but its more than a little disappointing to bestow upon him the backhanded compliments usually reserved for Steven Speilberg. The sordid subversions of his early career seem a thing of the past - he's now worked with three Academy award-winning screenwriters in a row. It may be time to admit that while his films have espoused anarchy, nihilism and the dissolution of all human knowledge, he may not be one of the outsiders he often chooses to depict. He's not a pawn in Hollywood's game - but he certainly isn't the one making the moves.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Their are exactly three shots fired in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and they are evenly distributed; one in the beginning punctuates a botched job by the MI-6; the next is used as a scare tactic during an interrogation by their Russian enemy; the last tidies up the sordid little affair, at least for now. Between these, there is little action to go around in Tomas Alfredson's feature adaptation of John Le Carre's 1974 novel. Previously a miniseries starring Sir Alex Guinness, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is far from the fast-paced, action-packed world of James Bond; its characters occupy a higher rung of the intelligence community, and hold a commensurate security clearance. "Right at the top of the Circus", where, to the collective dismay, a Russian mole has been at work for decades.   

After dispatching field agent Prideaux for a meet with a Hungarian who may have the identity of the mole, Control (John Hurt) is murdered. The ministry turn's to Control's familiar Smiley (Gary Oldman) to investigate his office from the outside. The men, dubbed Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Tailor (Ciaran Hinds) and Spy (David Dencik), are, if not Smiley's oldest friends, the only peers one with such considerable power can rely on. Upon learning there is a mole, the recently retired and divorced Smiley is thrust even further into strategic and emotional isolation.

In the past, le Carre's work has lent itself equally to boredom (The Tailor of Panama) and the aesthetic equivalent of a seizure (The Constant Gardener); the subtlety of the material, its focus on emotions over action seems to stymie directors or send them into a stylistic tailspin, desperately seeking a way to pique the interest of the audience. This time, director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) has the cinematic sense to realign the story around Oldman's relationship not to his country, or his compatriots, or even his wife, but rather, to himself. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy bears resemblance to Coppola's introverted classic The Conversation, with just a dash of Michael Corleone. It is said repeatedly that Smiley is one man the Russians have to worry about; perhaps its because he's the only one in the Circus who won't take a drink at the office party.

When a Studio Canal and Working Title combine for a cold-war thriller, the production companies have awards, not dollar signs, in mind. The film's greatest boon is its cast, which take sometimes cliched dialog, including classics like "nothing is what it seems" and "they're going to kill me!" and elevates them to "serious drama" territory. Mark Strong and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Tom Hardy performance are the closest we ever get to Bond; they're the field agents who get honors of cruising through port cities in a Mercedes convertible with a leggy blonde, and facing the live ammunition. Though this is the sexier assignment, Tinker reminds us at every turn that it's the craggy pencil pushers like Hurt and Oldman that are actually safeguarding her Majesty's Royal Empire from danger.

The fullness of each characterization and each performance, no matter how small, keeps us guessing even after the rather predictable revelation. Whether the explanation is satisfying may depend upon your ideology. It's the nature of the conflict; one character wistfully remember fighting the Nazis as "a real war; Englishmen could be proud then." The indefatigable flow of the Circus continues, with a new Control, a new set of enemies, and new directives. The the men shuffling in and out of the freestanding mausoleums that pass as offices may change in appearance and name, but never in purpose. Alfredson frequently frames his characters in these bureaucratic boxes, far from the frontline, where loyalty and motivation are easiest confused.

A war based on territory and weaponry comes to an end, but one in which trust is each combatant's goal can never be fully resolved; the prisoners we take end up being our own men. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a wonderfully understated take on the futility of pinning one's life to service of the government - there are simply too many unfit parts for the machine to work, and the satisfaction one gets must be found in one's private life. Oldman's wry smile upon first being offered the investigation tells us everything we need to know about the life of a spy; he is our opposite, taking his greatest thrills deceit, rather than from genuine human connection. Smiley is not just the best watcher in the unit; he's also the best actor.