David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s crime novel, is a love story. That might seem like an understatement of the many complicated threads found in the film and its source material’s investigative thriller, which touches on government conspiracies, crime, fascism, misogyny, journalism, and family drama. But all of that is little without The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s central protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), whose journey from strangers to co-detectives and lovers seems to be a center of gravity for us throughout.
From the film’s opening credits — a visceral experience of goo and Gothicism set to a brash cover of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song” — to its bleak Christmastime finale, we are tied to its dyad. They act as our perspective into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger and the tangled weeds of the larger Vanger family. In many scenes, Fincher brings us so close to Blomkvist and Salander that it feels like we’re clinging to them in fear, following behind as they peek beneath the cracks of this mystery.
After 10 years, that’s the most prominent legacy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is less interested in Larrson’s many threads about corruption, fascism, and misogyny. As Fincher and Zaillian agreed early in the writing process, this was, at its core, a story “about a guy and a girl.”
Back in 2009, Sony Pictures executives Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal began laying the groundwork for what would become The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. By the following spring, rights were secured, and Fincher signed on to helm the project despite a hefty post-production schedule for The Social Network. There was little time for rest — with less than two years to gather its show stopping cast and hit the icy landscape of Sweden before a December 2011 release, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rattled along, eventually bringing its dramatic story to theaters.
But the Millennium trilogy had already received its faithful — if sometimes uneven — Swedish films, all three released in 2009 to international commercial success. Those movies grappled with their unwieldy source material, sometimes reigning it in nicely and other times futilely shoehorning it all in. Unfortunately, Larsson’s work isn’t the easiest material to adapt. His tangents on government conspiracies and psychologies of serial killers are fascinating on the page and inform the characters’ backgrounds, but it’s difficult to include all of it for the screen.
Right off the bat, Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo seems to distance itself from its Swedish sisters and their struggles by trimming much of the novel’s fat and instead focusing on our leads’ partnership.
The film first connects them — and the eventual decades-old mystery they’ll solve — by presenting the duo at pivotal moments in their lives. Blomkvist is sued for libel by corporate bigwig Hans-Erik Wennerström, losing much of his journalistic credibility. While he and his magazine partner/sometimes lover Erika Berger (Robin Wright) deal with the aftermath, Swedish industry titan Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) has a security company run a background check on Blomkvist to see if he is fit for a potential project.
Salander, a finicky freelancer who’s only employed at the company thanks to her sheer brilliance, completes the check thoroughly, using her genius hacking abilities to gather information from Blomkvist’s computer. Despite any preconceived hesitations about her, Salander proves herself more than capable of her work — unfortunately, not everyone sees that. After her state-appointed guardian has a stroke, Salander finds herself under the supervision of Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), who keeps a tighter leash on Salander than she’s used to.
The situation turns worse when Bjurman rapes Salander, withholding finances and threatening to institutionalize her unless she submits. It’s a painful, harrowing narrative colored by sickly green fluorescents and desolate cityscapes, but Salander records the crime and later does similar damage to Bjurman, raping him with a dildo and tattooing “I’m a rapist pig” into his chest. She blackmails him with the video, ensuring he’ll be a much more cooperative guardian. The revenge is powerful, and Fincher lets us soak in the schadenfreude of Bjurman’s situation.
We then switch perspectives back to Blomkvist, who meets Henrik and hears the old man’s offer: on Hedestad Island, surrounded by various members of the dysfunctional Vanger family, Blomkvist will secretly investigate the 40-year-old disappearance and possibly death of Henrik’s grandniece, Harriet. At the time, she was 16 — a young girl, who melts into the warm summer shots of various blonde and blue eyed Vanger family members. In return, Henrik offers damning information on Wennerström, which Blomkvist can publish to restore his credibility and finally nag the corporate mogul.
Blomkvist reluctantly accepts, but soon realizes there’s more to Harriet’s mystery. He connects her to a group of disappearances and murders involving Biblical passages and decades of crimes. Overwhelmed, Blomkvist requests a research assistant, leading him to Salander. He learns of her background check on her — and thus, her computer hacking skills — and comes to her apartment with breakfast. It’s genuinely the only moment in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo where Salander is disconcerted, but Blomkvist’s forwardness intrigues here. It’s different in the Swedish adaptation, where Blomkvist angrily threatens to call the police.
Fincher brings the two together by their desires to investigate: Blomkvist, a nosey journalist by nature with a habit of getting in over his head, suddenly melds well with Salander, who’s eyes light up when she hears she can help catch a killer of women. And their journey to discovering what actually happened to Harriet is procedural, every failure and breakthrough extensively detailed. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes its time with every step of the case, but never forgets that its intentions lie with how Blomkvist and Salander grow together throughout their investigation.
We see the characters change their expression, process their information, and approach their investigations through Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth’s intimate shooting. We follow Blomkvist and Salander on long walks together; we join them in bed for sex. In this case, being in the room where it happens is pivotal to connect us to the duo.
The mystery eventually leads Blomkvist and Salander towards a much more disturbing revelation than they initially envisioned — one involving Harriet and her brother Martin (Stellan Skarsgârd)’s father Gottfried, a ruthless serial rapist and killer, who abused both his children as well as plenty of unnamed women. When Blomkvist and Salander learn that Martin continued raping Harriet until her disappearance, the clues of Harriet’s case all fall into place.
She escaped her torture, leaving her abusive brother and the suffocating darkness of Hedestad in search of a better — or at least safer — life. In the book and the Swedish adaptation, Harriet poses as her cousin Anita, who helped her escape in the first place, and lives in Australia. Fincher changes the location to London and has Blomkvist visit Harriet (Joely Richardson), believing her to be Anita, while investigating.
But in the decades after Harriet’s departure, Martin continued his father’s serial raping and killing. Both Fincher and the Swedish adaptation take extensive time studying the crimes, the latter showing us many photographs of the dead women in painstaking detail. Most of the victims were barely traced, their crimes investigated and then left cold. In Larsson’s novel, it acts as a sort of commentary on how easily Martin and Gottfried were able to get away with it. Two powerful men from an industrial behemoth — few, if any, would suspect them. And as Martin tells Blomkvist, many of his victims were immigrant women and prostitutes, people he claimed wouldn’t be missed. People who could vanish into thin air.
This is what makes Salander’s involvement so satisfying. As Fincher and Zaillian emphasize by cutting so much of the paratextual information in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to just focus on their two protagonists — Salander very well could’ve been one of Martin’s victims. She is a ward of the state, a jagged-haired delinquent with no family (that we know of — Fincher cuts Salander’s relationship with her mother from his adaptation and briefly mentions her father, the latter of whom becomes a central figure in the other Millennium trilogy installments).
But she isn’t anyone’s victim. Rather, especially in Fincher’s adaptation, she is the hero, a Bond-esque action star. In one of the best moments of the film, she sneaks into Martin’s house and saves Blomkvist, then asking him if she can chase Martin down and kill him. As she speeds through the night, faking out Martin’s car until he crashes and flips, Salander becomes a superhero, a revenger of women. When the job is done, Salander plans to officially establish her relationship with Blomkvist, bringing him a Christmas gift. She unfortunately finds him with Berger and leaves heartbroken, a moment that solidifies the subtleties of their complex romance.
With all of this in mind, especially as the film turns 10 this year, it’s questionable why Fincher and Sony didn’t make more of them. They had some of the best on-screen chemistry in recent memory, the perfect antithesis to Craig’s recent Bond films, an Academy Award nominated Salander, an aesthetic that brought hostility and danger out of the barren forests and icy waters of Hedestad, and a score that just grazes our goose-bumped skins.
It’s possible that the stories of The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which focus much more on Salander’s past and her father, often keeping her and Blomkvist apart — weren’t as interesting to anyone involved. In an interview with Cinemablend, Fincher himself said the script’s story for Fire was vastly different from the book, involving multiple rewrites and delayed production. Of course, the film was eventually scrapped, and Sony unsuccessfully attempted to reboot the franchise.
Fincher’s adaptation understands the best nugget of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Blomkvist and Salander together. He and Zaillian focus on that duo — those starkly different characters and how they navigate their complicated relationship. So, instead of beginning to build towards the stories of the sequels, they give us that story of a guy and girl.
