Of Swedish Stories and American Remakes

*SPOILER ALERT* This post contains some spoilers as to relationships between characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There are no spoilers about the central mystery itself.            

           Is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as good as the Swedish original? That is the question that any prospective viewer is sure to have at the front of their mind, but in the end, questions of good or bad seem almost irrelevant. While not a shot for shot remake by any means, David Fincher’s American version hews so close to Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish production that the film commits a crime only slightly better than being bad. It’s pointless.

            The plot unravels in much the same fashion as the original, with the same scene performing the same function almost every time. With one notable exception involving the film’s ultimate mystery, there is very little for someone already familiar with the material to be surprised by. But that is not the film’s greatest error, nor is it one that it can be particularly faulted for. In a genre such as the thriller mystery a good amount of the narrative material has to be rigidly adhered to unless one wants to simply abandon the plot altogether.  One does not have the option of focusing on some plotlines while ignoring others in genres such as this, although this is an error which should have been deduced at an earlier stage in the film’s production.

            It is not so much that the revelations of the plot are the same, but the manner in which they play out seems barely different. Different actors might be reading different lines, but everything just seems like a well-constructed paraphrase, where the individual words are altered to avoid plagiarism, but the overall thought remains the same. Nothing has been reinterpreted from the Swedish version, just repeated. Not even the setting appears to have undergone a makeover, with the bridge to the Vangers’ private island looking exactly the same. Even the setting of Sweden seems tired and while critics of cultural imperialism might bristle at the thought, a change of setting might have been useful, if only to force some originality into the film style. In fact, the way that the film is presented now seems to only strengthen the argument that this English remake is a product of cultural imperialism. There truly is nothing different in it when compared to the Swedish version. Simply a change in packaging that appeals to an American audience.

            Even the negative aspects of the original remain the same. The ending feels anticlimactic and a subplot about Lisbeth’s social worker in the film’s first third remains both disconnected from everything else and needlessly graphic. The relationship between the two leads blossoms just as improbably this time, and while there are additional romantic scenes between the two of them thrown in, it all seems rather contrived.  The plot is simply regurgitated, instead of tightened up as it could be. Much like the Harry Potter films, the movie seems more concerned with getting its plot points on screen than in reinterpreting them in any sort of cinematic way.

            To its credit the film also retains one of the high points of the Swedish original: the performance of its lead actress. As Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Maura seems to have a vulnerability distinct from anything that might be present in Noomi Rapace’s portrayal. The film never tires of showing us how tough and concentrated Lisbeth is, with a brusqueness that most of the Internet generation would find admirable instead of rude. Fincher’s film, however, makes a point of including several scenes, like those between Lisbeth and her “warden” so to speak, that humanize her, and Mara makes sure that this vulnerability and emotion is not something left behind in only those moments. When hunting down a murderer near film’s end she seems more a dervish temporarily taken by emotion, then the sleek assassin of the Swedish version. What might seem natural to Rapace plays off more as performative for Maura, but never in the sense that the actress is the one playing a character, or that the person hiding behind Lisbeth’s cold exterior is Rooney Maura. In this case, the person hiding behind something is Lisbeth.

             One of the jobs of a critic is to say whether a movie is worth spending your money on, and it is oftentimes best to do that without setting up conditionals such as whether or not you have seen the original version.  In this case however, the conditionals seem unavoidable. If you’ve seen the original version, there’s no need to bother with this one. Would you buy a virtually identical pair of sneakers when you already own a brand new pair? A change might be in order after the first pair has become worn out, but for the time being, there’s no need to own two identical pairs of shoes. The similarities between Fincher’s version and the Swedish version border on laziness, with a bravura credit sequence and appropriately eerie score seemingly wasted on such an uninspired product.  Of course, the film it draws its inspiration from was entertaining in its own right, so the question must be asked. What’s the point?