Movie Review: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", or There's Something I Want To Tell You About Timmy and Me

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
2011, Rated R
Written by Steven Zaillian (Screenplay) and Stieg Larsson (Novel)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, and Stellan Skarsgard

I'm sitting at a table in a restaurant called The Brewery downing a shot of whiskey to go with my deep fried pickles. I'm on a man-date with my pal Timmy, and there is nothing - I repeat, nothing - gay about what's going on here. It's my birthday - or near enough that it'll suffice - and Timmy has grown the best mustache I've seen in a long time just for the occasion, and has decided to take me out to celebrate. I stress, there is nothing gay about this.

Just in case you were wondering, I'm not secretly gay. I know I'm not secretly gay, because if I were gay, I would not be secretly gay. I'd be in an open, committed relationship with a guy named Martin, campaigning for legalized gay marriage together. But Martin is already in an open, committed relationship, so I'm not gay. I'll just have to keep campaigning for legalized gay marriage by myself. Sigh.

Seriously though, despite what you might think, the deep fried pickles aren't half bad. When I go out to eat somewhere new, I like to try something I've never tried before. I get a local beer, a local whiskey, and a house specialty so I can justify the drinking with the catch-all disclaimer, "to wash it all down." Tonight the house specialty is deep fried pickles, though the names of the beer and whiskey seem to have escaped me. If I drink enough of them, the deep fried pickles might even escape me, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

I love hangin' out with Timmy. He's the best non-gay-man-date-on-my-birthday friend I have. Well, this year anyway. We talk local beers, local whiskeys, and house specialties for a while before we finally get down to the nitty gritty.

"Tim," I say, "I'm jealous as hell of your mustache."

It really is a work of art. Thick but not bushy. It rolls over his upper lip in a neat arc, stopping just short of interfering with the passage of a deep fried pickle. Like ol' Timmy himself, the mustache is reserved but cool.

My mustache is much the same, in the sense that it reflects my character. It grows out in seven different directions, never quite finding the right one. The edges both swoop to the right as if I'm caught in a strong wind, so I always come off looking disheveled and out of sorts. Which I usually am. Striving desperately to be cool, my mustache manages only to be strange and disconcerting. Like I said, it reflects my character.

Wrapped securely in our beer blankets, we spill out onto the street and start making for the theater. We've decided beforehand to see David Fincher's remake of the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The trailer claims it's "THE FEEL BAD MOVIE OF CHRISTMAS." What better way to celebrate reaching the official age of Hobbit adulthood?

Did I mention there is nothing gay about this man-date? I feel the need to stress that as, when we arrived at the theater and Timmy stepped up to pay, the girl at the register looked at me and said, "Is he your sugar daddy?" Where do people get stuff like this? Why can't two straight guys go out to dinner and a movie, then stop off for ice cream without people getting the wrong idea?

Ugh!

Going in, I have no real idea of what to expect. I've seen the preview and heard some of the buzz, but the preview revealed absolutely nothing to someone unfamiliar with the story, and buzz tends to become exactly that after you've heard it for a while; little more than a nonsensical background drone. So I'm going in with very few preconceptions beyond that the titular Girl (Rooney Mara) is kinda freaky looking. As I am soon to discover, she's not the only freaky thing about this movie.

For all the buzz and rumors, the film is actually surprisingly tame. Most of it is just a straight-ahead mystery about a disgraced reporter and a disturbed twentysomething who team up to figure out the truth behind the decades old disappearance of the niece of some rich Swede (Christopher Plummer). The vast majority of this movie is nothing out of the ordinary, except to the extent that quality filmmaking and solid storytelling are out of the ordinary in modern Hollywood. However, the 2% of this film that does take a turn for the disturbing doesn't just veer towards it; this is a high speed, head-on collision with the sick and wrong.

It doesn't feel out of place. I just want to make that clear. At no point do I feel like the deviant awfulness I'm watching has been shoehorned in for shock value. I'm just warning you. If you have the capacity to be shocked and horrified by a piece of fiction, you will be. If that doesn't sound like your kind of film, it probably isn't. Maybe some Mormon bootlegger will release a CleanFlicks version for you to download. And let me just say that, however high your tolerance for the violent and obscene, if these scenes don't bother you, you should seek psychological counseling right away, because you - like me - are most likely a danger to yourself and others.

Having said all that, director David Fincher proves once again that he is at the top of his game. Despite scenes of brutality that it turns my stomach to even recall, this film's faults are so miniscule as to only be classifiable as nitpicks. And I only came up with three. One hundred fifty-eight minutes of film, and I found three things to gripe about. I have to say, for a film not made by Star Trek nerds, that's pretty darn good. Not that it will stop me from going into them in detail. Right now.

1. Meddle of kronor

Early in the movie, Daniel Craig is sitting in a coffee shop and a news report comes on the TV describing a recent court ruling. The reporter says the defendant was fined, "six hundred thousand Swedish kronor." Now, I realize there is more than one country that uses kronor as its currency, and they are not interchangeable. There are Danish kroner and Icelandic kronur and Norwegian kroner and many other variants (including my favorite, the Estonian kroon), but the thing that aggravates me is that the movie is set in Sweden. Doesn't it make sense that, in Sweden at least, they would just say "six hundred thousand kronor," and assume you knew that they were referring to the local variety? When portraying a bank heist in an American movie, the robbers don't say things like, "Yeah Vinnie, I hear there's over four million US dollars in the vault." So how will audiences know they're not referring to Canadian dollars? God forbid we trust them to be smart enough to figure it out for themselves!

2. It's 20 degrees outside and I'm freezing!

There's a moment in the film when, (and I'm assuming here) for purposes of scene-setting, we are treated to a close up shot of a thermometer that shows the temperature to be somewhere in the low twenties. Trouble is, unless they meant to imply that the temperature was a balmy twentysomething degrees celsius, (seventy-one-ish degrees fahrenheit; doubtful, considering the thermometer was caked in ice and dusted with snow) the thermometer was displaying the temperature in fahrenheit! "But maybe they use fahrenheit thermometers in Sweden," you may be saying. "You can't just assume they measure the temperature in celsius! Have you ever been there?" Well, no. It's true, I've never been to Sweden. However, since the unit of measurement known as "celsius" was named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, I think it's a safe bet that this was - like "Swedish kronor" - another move aimed at dumbing things down for American audiences, because they simply wouldn't be able to understand (or possibly wouldn't accept) the idea of a celsius thermometer.

3. Things that make you go BOOOOOOOM!

Ever seen a propane tank explode? I haven't seen one in person, but I've seen them go up on YouTube. It's fairly impressive, and that's just the tiny kind you use to feed your gas grill. There was a story from Canada two years ago where one of the big ones (the kind you use to fuel your furnace) exploded and leveled an entire house, flinging debris hundreds of feet and shaking neighboring houses to the point that residents feared their homes were collapsing under the weight of packed snow. If you've seen the news footage, the snow was easily eight or ten feet deep, which may be all that protected the nearby houses from being leveled as well. Given these circumstances, I feel my desire not to be anywhere near one of these tanks, should it blow, to be completely justified. No doubt David Fincher would think me overly cautious. When he blew one up in the film, he had no qualms about placing his actress less than ten yards from the epicenter of the blast, and it didn't even sway her on her feet! So clearly I'm just a worry wart. Doesn't change things. I still don't want to be anywhere near one if it goes up. Sue me.

Alright, alright, so maybe I am just a nitpicker who has to find a reason to gripe about a movie, but when I really like a movie, little things like that just drive me crazy. It isn't that they're so bad, it's that the rest of the film is so good. It's like this: If you're looking at a burn victim (and I mean no disrespect to burn victims, so don't get hot under the collar) you're probably not going to be that shocked if they've got a nasty cold sore on their lip. But if Kim Kardashian showed up on the cover of Cosmo' with that same cold sore, her dress is the last thing you're going to be commenting on.

(For the record: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm soooooooo sorry for dragging a Kardashian into this, but she is so overexposed that I simply cannot recall the face of anyone else who has ever graced a magazine cover. I know I gave up all my punk cred when I mentioned her name, but please don't hold this against me! I'm a victim as much as you are!)

But yeah, I liked it. How could I not? I love movies and I have absolutely no horror threshold when it comes to them. In the end it meets the most important of all standards in fiction: It's an interesting story, well told.

As we leave the theater, our beer blankets are gone and the chill in the air has grown a nasty set of teeth. I feel like I'm in Sweden again, this time transported by an escalator and automatic doors rather than the magic of cinema. If only I had a thermometer to tell me the temperature. It'd have to be fahrenheit, of course. The audience wouldn't know how to handle one that displayed celsius, and I don't know the conversion formula anyway.

We're parked three blocks down, by the restaurant. We step into the crosswalk and a blast of icy wind ushers us forward. Timmy shivers. Did I mention that he forgot to bring his coat?

"You want to borrow my coat?" I say.

Timmy is wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Did I mention that it was warmer when we left the house?

"Naw, I'm okay," he says.

"Come on," I say. "I'll be alright. I've got three layers on under it."

"I'm fine," he says as another gust hits us and he rubs his arms for warmth. "Price I pay for not planning ahead."

I finally just take my jacket off and drape it over his shoulders. He says he doesn't need it, but he doesn't exactly throw it back at me. I'm fine. I've got my sweater and long johns to keep me warm. I'm just glad to repay the kindness of a friend who was thoughtful enough to take me out for my birthday.

I repeat, there is nothing gay about any of this.

Well, not too gay anyway.