Chapter Two: The Girl Who Played With Fire
By Brett Beach
February 3, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I watched all three movie adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy - for the first time each - on my desktop Mac this past week. One was a Redbox rental, the other two I streamed from Netflix. There was a time when I could not, or would not, have been able to do that. I did not allow myself to watch any movies on any sort of computer device until late 2003, when necessity and circumstance got the better of me.
In the immediate months (fall of 2003 and most of 2004) following my divorce, as I cut my expenses to the bone and sold away all my DVDs, CDs, books, cassettes, and videotapes, I lived in one bedroom of a cramped two bedroom/two bath apartment 10 miles outside of Portland, in the town of Beaverton (which Simpsons creator Matt Groening used to like to tell interviewers he was actually from, just to say the name out loud). I roomed with a single mother and her two young boys, who all shared the master bedroom. The boys suffered from distressing food allergies that she was still attempting to diagnose and pinpoint. There wasn’t much in the way of any pre-packaged food she could give them without risking severe reactions, so the tiny hovel was always overpowered with the scent of whatever fresh vegetables she was boiling on the stove or meal she was slow cooking in the crock pot. If occasionally the smell was far from pleasant, the emanating heat kept the space cozy and I would often fall asleep to the sounds of her puttering around in the kitchen and/or various sauces or recipes bubbling and popping into the wee hours.
Being still responsible for the lion’s share of the mortgage on the house that my ex-wife and I had recently purchased and that I would never live in, I needed someplace cheap to call home. I knew being choosy was not an option. At $200 a month, the room — which I would peg at about 150-175 square feet—fit the bill. I got a free futon from a co-worker. I borrowed a 13-inch television set from a friend. The antenna had seen better days and only two channels came in with any sort of dependability. I had no VCR or DVD player. I had a five-year-old Toshiba laptop that was already on the decline, technologically speaking, but it would have to do. And it did.
For the next year, everything I rented from the library or video store I watched on that laptop. There were quite a few keepers:
Brother Bear - This Disney film features one of the most uproarious commentary tracks ever. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas play a pair of moose in the film — moose that talk like the iconic McKenzie Brothers the pair created — and they recorded the commentary in character as if the film was real. Without being in any way inappropriate, it easily stands as one of the most subversive artistic expressions ever commissioned and allowed by the Mouse House. The two take jabs at moviemaking, Hollywood, Disney and any other topic that springs to mind. Moranis and Thomas are on fire for 85 mins as they seemingly improvise their way through from one end to the other. I still haven’t seen the film “straight” and don’t know if I could.
Degrassi: The Next Generation (Season 1) - I tore through all 13 episodes in one weekend. I have a severe love for this Canadian teen drama in all its incarnations and hope to one day do a column on Degrassi Junior High. I keep collecting the new seasons as they come out on DVD, certain that at any moment they will finally stop making the show and I can watch the entire saga from start to finish. Which is another way of saying, I haven’t watched anything since the first season and they are now up to Season 10.
Melvin Goes to Dinner - Very rarely do I watch a film immediately after it ends. I watched Melvin three times in a row (granted, it is a short film). Kind of like My Dinner with Andre for Generation X, it’s foul-mouthed and feisty, but also unexpectedly tender. I still am not sure how director Bob Odenkirk kept this from spinning off axis into something resembling his and David Cross’ Mr. Show series, but his restraint is admirable and he gets wonderful cameo and uncredited work from himself and Cross, as well as Jack Black, Melora Walters, Fred Armisen, Maura Tierney, and Laura Kightlinger. With its themes of pushing back against the stasis in our lives, a need for something profound to fill a spiritual void, and the life-impacting effects of carrying on an affair with a married woman (which, I dunno, might have carried some resonance for me at the time), it winds up being more fulfilling than its deceptively simple parts would suggest.
The Office - Yes, I enjoyed the BBC series and cringed horribly every moment that Ricky Gervais so completely embodied the cluelessness, callousness, and overall venality of David Brent (i.e. all of them) but what sticks with me is the DVD menu screen from the (I believe) first series. It played ambient office sounds — background chatter, fluorescent lamps buzzing — in an eternal loop that I would swear never repeated. I left it on for days as a kind of white noise. It was oddly calming and soothing.
And I got better about watching on small screens. I would rent a portable DVD player for non-stop flights from Portland out to Long Island, during my stint as a corporate trainer for a mortgage and banking company. I would while away lonely evenings on the road in anonymous hotel rooms watching obscure foreign films or the Harry Potter series (for the first time) with a company loaner laptop.
I have never owed a flat-screen nor a home entertainment system, but the former now looms on the horizon as a distinct possibility and I realize that with the ability to play movies on gaming systems or to connect my computer to my television and stream off the web and watch on a much more appropriate-sized screen, that my narrative smacks of more than a little antiquated nostalgia. I certainly don’t see technology as the enemy, but neither have I ever felt the drive to own the newest, the flashiest, to stay on top of the latest “toys.”
And all of this is nice, but it’s still condensed and compacted and somewhat off-topic, and leaves me close to a million miles away from this week’s subject. Without further adieu...
The Girl Who Played with Fire is the screen adaptation of the second book in Larsson’s series about the unlikely friendship between Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist with a knack for pissing off important people in very high places, and Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social hacker whose overt guardedness comes from a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse. I have not read any of the books yet, but, as crammed full of plot as all three movies are, it seems likely to me that they are faithful adaptations. Two of the movies run just under or over two-and-a-half-hours and the other clocks in at over the two-hour mark.
There is a horrific rape in Dragon Tattoo that is taped and replayed by various parties and for various purposes in the second and third films. There are serial killers, murderous gangsters, corrupt government officials, sadistic psychiatrists, covert shadow organizations, brutal fistfights, attempted murders (not always successful) via gun, chainsaw, rope, axe, and fire, and dark family secrets involving incest, murderous appetites, and heretofore unknown siblings. Thankfully, all of the movies replay key information enough times so that becoming lost in a thicket of exposition is harder than it would seem.
While the three novels and films do indeed form a trilogy, only The Girl Who Played with Fire ends with an actual cliffhanger. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is mostly a self-contained story populated with characters that will not be a part of the other stories. It is this tale that serves to bring Blomkvist and Salander together for the first time and establishes the emotional connection that is maintained between them in the second and third films, even when their total screen time together in those installments easily clocks in at under thirty minutes. They communicate by computer, text, phone, and other characters, but very rarely face to face. They do sleep together several times, but even then, their connection is hardly about sex or physical attraction. In fact, the films do a good job of maintaining the semblance of a “father/daughter” relationship among the pair — he has no children and no significant long-term romantic involvements and she, for all intents and purposes, has been without parents since the age of 12.
As ridiculous as the plots get with their level of coincidences, and the way in which it seems everybody in Sweden has only one degree of separation from everybody else, Larsson’s plotting finds an ingenious way to undercut the potential for ridicule. From the manner in which Blomkvist and Salander are first brought together (the security company she works for is investigating him on behalf of an industrialist who would like to hire him to look into his family’s sordid past) to the recurring themes of secrets — family, political, national, and otherwise — that refuse to stay buried, Larsson constructs his fictional world like a house of cards where everything is inherently connected. When two disparate loners are brought together (say, a journalist and a computer whiz), it is only a matter of time before their encounter has unforeseeable ramifications.
Those ramifications are what drive The Girl Who Played with Fire. As the film opens, it is nearly two years after Dragon Tattoo took place and it seems as if Mikael and Lisbeth will never see each other again. He has been vindicated in the libel suit brought against him by the subject of a scathing expose, and she has been globetrotting with ill-gotten gains. But then, as his magazine is on the verge of publishing a new series about sex trafficking that threatens to implicate major players in Swedish law enforcement and the judicial system, Mikael is stunned when the author of the piece, his girlfriend, and Lisbeth’s former legal guardian are found murdered, execution style, with Lisbeth’s prints on the gun. Knowing she is innocent, Mikael sets out to prove it, while a cover-up is already under way to frame the two (or just murder them, whatever is more convenient at any given moment.)
The original Swedish title of Larsson’s first book translates roughly as Men Who Hate Women, and though it is especially relevant there, that phrase could accurately serve as the title for any one of them. An even more apt title would be Geriatric Ailing Men Who Hate Women, since the villains in each installment have been around for so long they are now into their late 60s and early 70s, attempting to hold on to the power structure they have grown accustomed to, flinching like moles when their world is held up to the light of day.
They are also quite willing to resort to violence themselves, and the movies do a good job of highlighting the irony of this wheezing status quo orchestrating murders in between dialysis treatments. The quote at the start of the column comes from a minor character (it may in fact be his only line), but it sums up the worldview of many males in Larsson’s oeuvre, who can’t see women as equals, and in many cases see them as less than human.
This epitomizes the inherent tension in Larsson’s work: As a journalist in real life, he was also outraged at violence against women and was an advocate against it. Lisbeth Salander is a heroine who reflects that belief in her actions and manners. She needs no one, takes care of herself, can defend herself in tight situations, refuses to apologize for her actions, and will brand an attacker with an incriminating phrase across his stomach.
She also suffers horribly, in quite explicit detail, and at great length. I can only imagine at this point how scenes like her rape play on the page. As much as she is allowed to retain her edge — with few concessions to make her more likable — there is also a subtle softening of her character in the second and third films. When first glimpsed abroad and on the run as The Girl Who Played with Fire opens, she is uncharacteristically disguised in a dress and blond wig. When a kindly doctor sneaks in a pizza for her in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, she almost cracks a slight smile to herself. By virtue of being in the hospital and then prison for much of the third film, she becomes more acted upon than force of nature.
The three films share two different directors and four different screenwriters, but all feel as if they rolled off the same solid sturdy movie assembly line. This isn’t meant as a criticism so much as an acknowledgment on my part that picking one part as better than the others feels like a zero-sum game. What tilts The Girl Who Played With Fire upwards in my affections is director Daniel Alfredson’s skill with the many action set pieces.
The tour de force of the film doesn’t even feature the two leads. It’s a bare-knuckle brawl between a blond-domed henchman impervious to pain and Lisbeth’s kickboxing trainer (played by real-life Swedish welterweight Paolo Roberto apparently playing himself) who is attempting to save Lisbeth’s part-time lover from being gutted. The blows go on for several minutes allowing the sense of fatigue on Alberto’s part to sink in. Not knowing the plots from the books, and not having the benefit of “star names” in roles to guess as to who might live or not, I found myself more emotionally and viscerally invested in this action scene and others.
That barnyard knockdown is matched with the “family reunion” of sorts that closes the film, showing that if Salander is tough enough to take a bullet to the head and crawl back out of her own grave, she’d better expect her old man to be equally tenacious. I have not seen Noomi Rapace in any other roles, but as she now appears to be heading towards Hollywood-ization with the Sherlock Holmes sequel and Ridley Scott’s upcoming sci-fi film, I hope she maintains the edge that she displays in these films with her upcoming role. It would be a welcome blast of vitriol.
And now, I guess I have some reading to do...
Next time: I head back to Netflix streaming once again to catch up with another acclaimed crime trilogy of the last few years.