Noomi Rapace in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Feminist heroine or hypocrisy in black leather?

There's an interesting debate regarding "the girl" at the center of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," the film version of the internationally popular novel -- the first of three published, posthumously, after the death of journalist and crime novelist Stieg Larsson -- which was destined for the screen, since nothing speaks the universal language of money more clearly than serial killings.

Larsson's book was originally titled "Men Who Hate Women."

Without giving too much away, it involves a disgraced Stockholm investigative journalist and a volatile computer hacker as they follow the trail of a decades-old series of miserable sex crimes, hinging on the disappearance 40 years earlier of the reporter's own baby sitter.

Much of the story unfolds on a remote island: "The bridge is the only link to the mainland," someone says at one point, uttering the words any thriller set on a remote island is contractually bound to include. There, the surviving members of a shadowy family of industrialists with Nazi ties are living out their days, and it's where the journalist relocates to play detective.

The film version stars a wonderful Swedish-Icelandic actress named Noomi Rapace as the hacker and Michael Nyqvist as the reporter. They are excellent and subtle and honest.

Here's the debate.

Like James Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential," David Peace's "Red Riding" Yorkshire mysteries and many others, the film version of "Dragon Tattoo" is both appalled and, in a familiar way, appalling. Its characters cannot fathom the depths to which humanity can sink to satisfy their sick, sick urges. Yet the entire enterprise depends on wallowing in those depths.

The movie's politics are completely scrambled: Lisbeth, the hacker, endures a painfully explicit sexual assault at the hands of her court-appointed guardian, and director Niels Arden Oplev takes his time with the scene.

It's not salacious, exactly, but you sense that he's lingering on the depravity only because the rapist will get his comeuppance soon enough.

Is the bisexual, tattooed, whip-smart Lisbeth a feminist heroine?

By some loose definition of feminism, serial-killer-thriller division, sure. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is exceptionally well-acted. But I've sort of had it with this stuff, whether it's American or Swedish.

Every five minutes on network TV, some stoic, heartsick crime-fighter holds up another grotesque autopsy photo; every 10 minutes at the multiplex, we settle in for one more load of appalled, appalling evidence of what men who hate women do for their amusement. And for ours.

 

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"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" Movie Trailer

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her beloved uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and the tattooed and troubled but resourceful computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) to investigate. When the pair link Harriets disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from almost forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

Author Stieg Larsson, who died suddenly in 2004, left behind three unpublished novels, known as the Millennium trilogy, which have become a global sensation, elevating Larsson to the worlds second best-selling author last year (behind The Kite Runners Khaled Hosseini). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the decades major literary success stories, selling over 8,000,000 copies worldwide and the film adaptation is the highest grossing Swedish film in history and 2009s highest-grossing film in Europe.

 

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No MPAA rating (violence, sex, language).

Running time: 2:32.

Cast: Michael Nyqvist (Mikael Blomkvist); Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander); Lena Entre (Erika Berger); Sven-Bertil Taube (Henrik Vanger).

Credits: Directed by Niels Arden Oplev; written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson; produced by Soren Staermose. A Music Box Films release. In Swedish with English subtitles.