girl book v. movie

Last weekend I saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and there’s one thing I’ve got to say right away.

I disagree with the friends and reviewers who say the movie is much more about Lisbeth Salander than the Vanger mystery Mikael Blomkvist is trying to solve. I found the opposite to be the case, which was how it should be in terms of remaining true to the book. Both the book and the movie intersperse glimpses of Salander’s life with the main plot (the Vanger mystery) until she’s finally brought into the mystery herself when Blomkvist begins working with her. It’s a technique that I thought was spot-on in both instances.

Of course the movie does cut a significant amount of the book. The cuts were welcome in the case of the Blomkvist’s legal trouble—and Millennium’s related financial issues. I found those threads to be a little tiresome in the book. However, they are minimized so much that someone who had not read the book might be confused by the movie. What I missed in the movie was Salander’s interactions with her employer Dragan Armansky, who is a great character who becomes increasingly important in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. It’s also too bad the filmmakers decided to turn him into a pretty boy, which I didn’t sense in the book.

The horrifying violence between Salander and Bjurman in the book almost prevented me from seeing the movie. Friends have said they didn’t think it was as bad in the movie, and I agree that there certainly weren’t as many instances as there were in the book. But the actual acts in the movie had an eeriness to them that felt even worse than how they were described in the book. I think that had to due with Yorick van Wageningen’s performance and David Fincher’s direction.

On the subject of the performances, I have to say I enjoyed all of them. With the exception of Armansky and Salander’s original guardian, Palmgren, I thought the casting was perfect. And that surprised me. I was prepared to dislike Rooney Mara (part of me really wanted to see what Emma Watson would have brought to the role—there was a quality in her Burberry ads and her performance in The Prisoner of Azkaban that made me wonder), but she owned the role. 

Owned it, I tell you.

Finally, if you saw the movie but didn’t read the book, I recommend doing so now and reading the other two books in the series in preparation for the other movies (assuming they’re made; or if you decide to watch the Swedish versions). They’ll help you have an even better understanding of Salander, which makes Mara’s performances even more amazing.