by Louis Williams

Created on: January 05, 2011   Last Updated: March 29, 2011

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson’s novel, set in Sweden, is huge because it is crammed with characters. The Vanger family — wealthy industrialists going back well into the nineteenth century, some of them Nazis during the Second World War — must number fifty, and they are all thoroughly described, they all have speaking parts, and they’re nearly all present till the end of the book. Putting this novel on the screen uncut would make for viewer fatigue and distract from what is central: the two primary characters: Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the investigative journalist who, having lost in court to the Winnerstrom corporation, must do time for libel, and Lizbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the girl with the tattoos, damaged and brilliant, any prospective mother-in-law’s nightmare, who makes most computer hackers look like dropouts from first grade arithmetic.

Lizbeth, faced with an impossible electronic challenge, will find a way through it or around it or, failing both, will figure a way to transcend it or attack it from the rear. She will not be defeated: the byzantine Vanger family, convoluted as any of the families in Faulkner’s work, can’t hide from her any more than it can hide from Blomkvist, a more conventional researcher, who simply stays on the case till it surrenders to him.

The case here is the disappearance of teenaged Harriet Vanger forty years earlier. No body was ever found, nor was anything ever heard about or from her. Her grandfather, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) now a very old man, at least wants her body found, thus his hiring of Blomkvist, a highly competent investigator. Another mark in Blomkvist’s favor is that he’s going to jail for having opposed the Winnerstrom corporation. Part of his pay will consist of evidence possessed by the Vangers that will nail Winnerstrom and exonerate Blomkvist.

All of this seems straightforward enough, except for one matter, the Vanger family itself which, beyond the patriarch Henrik, is full of spooky brothers, nephews, and cousins, some of whom still thrill to the thought of Hitler, many of whom would rather no one investigate such Mandarins as themselves, one of whom may, for reasons totally obscure, have murdered Harriet. When Blomkvist comes to the island home of the Vangers, he finds himself in the long aftermath of what is essentially a Locked Room mystery, and himself the target of a killer no one has ever suspected. Accompanying and aiding him is Salander, definitely not a hometown girl.

True to most investigative/police work, the two spend their time looking at pictures of a parade that took place on the day Harriet disappeared, reading, both on paper and electronically, about local generation-old hate crimes and gradually reconstructing a climate of serial murder that everyone present lived in but didn’t notice because the murders were spaced over time and distance.

What interests more than the search, though, which ends with Harriet, fled from her own murderous father and brother, being found in Australia, and the discovery of the father and son killers, who are definitely the darkest side of the Vanger family, is the pair of sleuths themselves, especially the formidable Lizbeth, who would frighten most small children but who is yet full of passion and a definite good will, at least toward those who have good will.

Add to this Sweden itself which, despite the homicides and the torture of certain Vangers, is a green and pleasant land, and you have, on film, as on the page, a first rate entertainment.

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