plug: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
"The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas"
Been riding the David Fincher train this week. It’s the 25th anniversary of Se7en so I rewatched that Tuesday night and put Zodiac on in the background yesterday (makes for a dour mood but not an inappropriate one, all things considered, also, both movies still fuckin rule in case you were wondering). It’s also the 10th anniversary of The Social Network and there’s a lot of Fincher content going around on the internet. So for today’s plug I thought I’d remind everyone that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is another great Fincher joint that we never gave the attention it deserved.
And why would we have? It was 2011 and we were staring down the barrel of the final Superhero takeover of blockbusterdom. At the same time, it was a big-budget, high-profile adaptation of popular IP (Stiegg Larsson’s runaway-hit trilogy of novels), albeit the type of fucked-up shit that people love to read in books or watch in true crime documentaries, but not so much see brought to strange, uncanny life in a glossy big-screen spectacle. People love “feel bad books,” but “the feel bad movie of Christmas,” as the film’s sick teaser trailer suggests, is a trickier proposition.
Hell, I didn’t get around to watching Dragon Tattoo until like two or three years ago. Not sure why, I liked Fincher plenty at the time of its release, and as a Bond fanatic I was stoked to see what Fincher would do with Daniel Craig. I dunno, I guess it was just easy to forget about it like everyone around me, even the people who’d been reading those goddamn books for forever. But once I did watch it I was overwhelmed by its quality, its beauty, its grotesquery, the meticulous, mesmerizing slow-burn procedure and Bosch-like horror of it all.
If there’s an heir apparent to Kubrick among the list of “auteurs” still working today, I think it’s David Fincher (this is an ongoing debate between myself and Nic, who feels PTA is the more natural Kubrick successor), not because there’s an overt similarity between their respective filmographies, but rather the “thousand-takes perfectionist” brand they kinda share, combined with the tightrope they both seem to walk between commercialism and fucking up said commercialism with twisted shit. They’re also both masters of their craft in very specific, idiosyncratic ways. One of Fincher’s greatest ticks is the way he “hijacks your eyes” with behavior-driven camera movement, as this video explains.
Anyway, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hijacks your eyes and distorts your reality as effectively as any other Fincher film, plus it’s got pretty much every other Fincher essential in spades. It has the contemporary-gothic twitch of Se7en, the procedural monotony turned dark, beautiful mindscape journey of Zodiac and Mindhunter, the prestige sheen of The Social Network, the propulsive pop-modernity and urgency of Fight Club. And like Gone Girl, Dragon Tattoo takes unique advantage of its two lead actors.
Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara share protagonist duties in this murder mystery with an abnormal five-act structure as disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist and damaged PI/hacker Lisbeth Salander. Mara has this whole indie/arthouse star persona now and it’s easy to forget that this was her breakout role. She’s tremendous. It’s a truly chameleonic performance, the likes of which is rarely achieved even by actors known for that kind of thing. As for Craig, Fincher does with his Bond persona what John McTiernan did with Pierce Brosnan’s in The Thomas Crown Affair — framing and lighting him with a clear affection for the relationship he already has with the audience, but tweaking that relationship with precision, and to mesmerizing effect.
Speaking of Bond, one of my favorite things about this movie is that it opens with a shocking twist on the 007 credits sequence, which fuckin slaps.
Fincher also composes a killer ending (no pun intended), which I won’t give away here, but I will say I kind of love it when a movie does the Clockwork Orange/“Singin’ in the Rain” thing where it ruins an otherwise innocent song for everyone forever (recent example: I just watched Pink Flamingos for the first time and I’m sure I’ll never hear “Surfin’ Bird” again without the accompanying image of a man’s gaping asshole). Enya stans, you’ve been warned.
Fincher has said that when he signed on to make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he wasn’t as interested in making another serial killer movie as he was in making a thoughtful, complex, R-rated franchise for adults — something he'd waited his whole career to do. It’s a goddamn shame the franchise fell apart before he was able to see it through because that’s exactly what’s been dead-ass missing from franchise filmmaking for the last decade at least (by the way, am I the only one who’s disappointed that Fincher had to ditch his World War Z sequel and made this Netflix Citizen Kane thing instead?). But hey, long-form storytelling for adults lives on in TV, which is exactly where Fincher has been since Dragon Tattoo, so at least we got Mindhunter out of all this.
…and just for fun I’ll leave you with my Top 5 Finchers:
Zodiac
Se7en
Fight Club
The Social Network
Mindhunter