The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Unlikey Alliances

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Rated: R Graphic Nudity, Brutal Violent Content, Torture, Language, Rape and Strong Sexuality
Release Date: December 21, 2011
Runtime: 2 hrs 38 min

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Steven Zaillian, novel by Stieg Larsson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, Steven Berkoff

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SYNOPSIS: After a lawsuit leaves a journalist at the wrong end of a career he takes an assignment to investigate a 40-year-old murder. Making some headway, he requests a brilliant but troubled research assistant to help him.

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REVIEW: Director David Fincher has helmed such unique fare as Flght Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and intense mysteries like Zodiac. Based on the first of a trilogy of international best selling novels known as the "Millennium Trilogy" published posthumously by the Swedish author Steig Larsson, Fincher takes on Americanized version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (from the book translated to "Men Who Hate Women" and the 2009 Swedish produced film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Does Fincher's version live up to the hype worthy of the international best-selling books and the original film trilogy?

Millennium Magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace) emerges on the losing end of a libel lawsuit against a billionaire financier named Wennerström. As his savings disappears for damages and his magazine starts to flounder financially, Mikael is vetted then approached by Frode (Steven Berkoff, The Tourist) on behalf of Hendrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, Priest), a retired businessman who has obsessed over the disappearance of his granddaughter Harriet (Moa Garpendal) over 40 years ago and has feared that she was murdered. As Mikael digs into the family's background and past under the guise of Hendrick's researcher for his own memoirs Mikael struggles to find the connections to the clues he has access to. Eventually, with a thin shred of proof and an gut feeling, Mikael requests the assistance of the genius troubled antisocial computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, The Social Network) the researcher who originally vetted him for the project to begin with.

Clocking in at 158 minutes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would seem to be too large a commitment to be worth while. On the contrary, Fincher's experience and style lends perfectly to the slow building mystery set before Craig's Mikael and Mara's Lisbeth. The anticipation of following the detectives using their own methods hooks you from the start. In fact, Mikael and Lisbeth do not actually meet face to face until the second half of the film. But while Mikael starts his investigation as a retreat from his own personal and professional problems, Lisbeth endures her own internal and external demons as she tries to make it on her own as a ward of the state with the albatross of being labeled as criminally incompetent.

Starting with the abstract introduction of the Karen O and Trent Reznor's amped up rendition of Led Zepplin's "The Immigrant Song", Reznor's scores soon recede to buzzing and pops that prod at the back of the brain like an itch that can't be scratched. Minimalistic in nature from an impressionist point of view, Reznor and Atticus Ross's work focuses the audience's attention into the fabric of Fincher's dark story and gray settings.   

If unfamiliar with the novels or the original films, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, graphic film. Showing nudity and violence, Fincher never puts anything on display in a gratuitous manner. Some of the acts of brutality borders on the obscene and may offend some movie-goers' threshold tolerances, but rest assured that there is meaning in everything. Rooney Mara is the standout performance as Lisbeth Salander, her brilliant character both off-putting and sympathetic.

A fresh eye for this first entry of the Americanized "Millennium" trilogy, having read any of the novels or watched any of the original films, Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a serious slow building take at the brutality that man can inflict on man, or on women. Since I did not have previous works to rely on to spoil the ending of this version, I came away entertained and in awe of what good story, great characters, and fine direction can accomplish.

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WORTH: Matinee and DVD

Moneyball

The Romance of Baseball

Director: Bennett Miller

Writers: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin, Michael Lewis (book: "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game")

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop

SYNOPSIS: Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A's, struggles to put together a baseball team on a budget, ultimately bucking the tried-and-true established tradition of recruiting baseball players by employing computer-generated analysis.

REVIEW: Bennett Miller, director of Capote from 2006, returns to the captain's chair to direct te new sports drama Moneyball. Based on the book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" penned by Michael Lewis and brought to the big screen by Steven Zaillian (Scindler's List, Gangs of New York), Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The Social Network) from a story by Stan Chervin, the film follows the struggles of Major League Baseball's Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and his struggles to field a competitive and competent baseball team with a monetary budget a fraction of the amount that successful winning teams have.

Centering around the General Manager of the Oakland A's from the end of the 2001 season where the A's lost the ALDS series to the Yankees, getting to the play-offs with stars like Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen, and Johnny Damon. After losing the series, big-market ball clubs pick off the A's premier stars with bigger paydays. Trying to rework his team, former player turned scout turned A's General Manager Billy Beane struggles to replace and rebuild due to the monetary cap of the small-market club. Where the New York Yankees have $142 million to spend on their players, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) attempts to put a competitive team together with a 1/5th that amount. Realizing that the tried-and-true "five tools" method of scouting and recruiting isn't going to help him develop a winning franchise, he runs across Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate with a economics degree providing player analysis for the Cleveland Indians, and starts prospecting for the 2002 season with players that are undervalued on paper according to Brand but contradicts all the scouting wisdom that had become the mainstay for recruiting.


For the novice or the sports ignorant, Billy Beane's quest for the Oakland A's to return to the post-season is illuminating and riveting. Can a team from the "...island of misfit toys..." complete and excel against powerhouse ball clubs? Will the fans, sports radio and the public turn against Beane because of his unorthodox decisions? Will Beane and Brand have the support of the A's ownership, the coach, the scouts and the players?


Brad Pitt is worthy of the role he embodies for Moneyball. With an easy smile that hides an uneasy major league ball player past, a failed marriage and a daughter he only wants the best for, Pitt's character is both fearless and fearful, filled with regret and desire to change the game for the better. Jonah Hill's Peter Brand statistics analyst is stoic and smart. His deadpan deliveries during interchanges with Beane get quite a few laughs, even while Hill plays the straight man. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays A's coach Art Howe like a lumbering bear, reluctant to work with Beane's new strategies while he tries to keep his own job and reputation above reproach. Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreations) joins as unsure first baseman Scott Hatteberg and Stephen Bishop rounds out the primary cast as over-the-hill unwanted veteran David Justice.


Not as epic as The Natural, silly as A League of their Own, or nostalgic as Field of Dreams, Moneyball is a grounded and interesting look at a real-life modern major league ballclub, looking at Beane and Brand as both innovators and madmen, daring to throw away decades of tradition surrounding America's Favorite Pastime. The aforementioned films serve to romanticize a sport that is engrained in our national consciousness, but Moneyball throws in a solid sliding pitch into the sports drama genre.

WORTH: Matinee or DVD

The Conspirator

An Angry Nation on Film

Director: Robert Redford

Writer: James D. Solomon, Gergory Berstein

Stars: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin Kline, Justin Long, Danny Huston

RANT: Spending Easter in the midwest with my family. My big sister and her family have come in from California for the week, so I get to spend time with them as well. A big win for my heart, but a loss for seeing movies this weekend. Luckily, only Water for Elephants opened, which one newspaper claimed to be "The Lamest Show on Earth". I will return with more reviews next week.

SYNOPSIS: Union Captain turned lawyer, Frederick Aiken, is charged with the military court defense of the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.

Robert Redford returns to the director's chair with his historical account of the military trial of Mary Surratt, the owner of the boarding house where the Lincoln kidnapping, turned assassination, was planned by John Wilkes Booth and his confederate sympathizers.

James McAvoy stars as Union Captain Frederick Aiken who, after returning from the war between the states, goes into the practice of law under Senator of Maryland Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). Johnson is tasked with defending Mary Surrat (Robin Wright), the owner of a boarding house where her son, John Wilkes Booth and other southern and confederate sympathizers planned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Dealing with divided loyalties in front of the military tribunal while defending the accused co-conspirator Mary Surratt, Johnson puts Aiken on her defense to give her a chance at a fair trial.

The history of the film is as poignant as that of Scott's Black Hawk Down or Milk. Mary Surratt is an admitted southern sympathizer needing to support herself and her family after the death of her husband on trial for her accused part in the assassination of the nation's President. Aiken is a union soldier and lawyer, only defending Surratt because he has to, not because he believes in her. Regardless of his beliefs, Aiken does defend her to the chagrin of his Union soldier compatriots and his girlfriend, as well as the peril of his career.

Redford shoots the film in a smokey haze. The military courtroom is barely more than a barracks at a fort, the dust and haze filtering and reflecting in the low light coming from the windows. Other scenes are shot just as softly, as if the camera lens was covered with Civil War era gauze. The bandages that cover the wound of a dead president and a divided nation seem to seep into every frame. Will Mary Surratt be the first woman to hang for her alleged part in the plot? Will a union military tribunal result in a fair verdict, in spite of a enraged public? Will Secretary of War Edwin Stanton allow any verdict to dissuade him from rendering angry and biased judgement?

The acting is stellar. McAvoy is torn between duty to the law, to justice, and to a mourning nation. Wilkinson is calculated for his career, but concerned for what possible justice can come out of this trial. Danny Huston as the prosecutor booms every witness and has all of the angles covered. And finally Robin Wright, as Mary Surratt, is a woman devout to her beliefs in God, her beliefs in the Confederacy, and the belief in her innocence.

A moving portrait of the lengths that one will go to to protect the greater good, The Conspirator is classic Robert Redford direction - thoughtful and deep. But The Conspirator is more Lions for Lambs than The Horse Whisperer or Quiz Show. You can definitely enjoy this film at home, whether you are blue or grey.

WORTH: Netflix