The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo vs Amelie

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is exciting, well-cast and acted, frightening, tense, violent and suspenseful. It looks great and introduces viewers to an original and charismatic new actress. But, bad news: Swedish. Let’s remake that fucker so people will watch it. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is being remade next year, by David Fincher. I trust Fincher completely, but I don’t see a reason to wait in watching a perfectly good original, just because we don’t recognize the names on the poster.

You guys can read, right? The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is subtitled, so being from Sweden isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying it. I’m one of the dumbest people you know, and I didn’t need help with a single word! If I can read/watch The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, then you can read/watch it too!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, for roughly an hour, operates as two parallel movies. One involves Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist sent to prison after failing to prove that his reports about fraud and corruption in a corporation were accurate (they were). When he’s released, he’s hired by a rich old man who wants to find out the true fate of his beloved missing niece. The girl has been been gone since the 1960s. Was she murdered? Kidnapped? Running from something? To check out Michael’s abilities and credentials, an expert researcher was involved: Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the tattooed girl of the title, and the subject of the other storyline. In case any of you assumed that the title character would be a girl who needed saving, or a femme fatale to lead the hero to his possible destruction, well, like me, maybe you watch too many American films. Lisbeth Salander is a violent, distrustful, bisexual computer genius. A couple times, she could use saving, but no one comes. Instead, she doles out heavy revenge on her own terms. Lisbeth has a shaved head, piercings all over, wears leather head to toe, and is, of course, tattooed. But there’s nothing artificially hard about her. Every detail feels authentic and organic to this specific character. There’s no false punk or edginess. Lisbeth’s look probably gets her attention, but it’s also her armor. She’s always focused, always thinking, and only says what’s necessary. If any character in movies right now deserves a trilogy, it’s her.

Mikael begins his investigation into the missing girl, finding that her family is full of secrets, lies and Nazis. They’re a charming bunch. Mikael sets up shop, trying in vain to get information. Meanwhile, Lisbeth is dealing with the world’s worst parole officer (in the movie’s most harrowing and difficult sequence), and, curiously, is still watching Mikael via her computer. She’s leaves a clue that she’s there, and Mikael figures, what the hell, put her to work. And so they team up, and bring the movie into focus. The last half of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo blends the traditional crime mysteries of Agatha Christie with more modern odd-couple-solving-gruesome-murders genre pictures like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs. There’s a lot of misdirection, as often is the case in thrillers; if we don’t know the killer, we might stay on edge. But if we’ve not been given a villain to fear at all, then an unseen killer is kind of inconsequential, right? Most of the potential bad guys in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are just pictures on the wall, so we don’t get much chance to cipher out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. We just know someone’s got a gun, and that someone else wore a certain sweater a few decades back in an unclear photograph.

Eventually, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remedies this by putting a satisfying cap on the hunt for the killer (That’s not a spoiler. Just because there’s a killer, doesn’t mean I’m referring to the missing girl at all. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has a lot going on, including a high body count). More importantly, it gives us two absolutely indelible, fascinating characters I’d like to see again. I’m pretty attached to their Swedish portrayers, though, so memo to David Fincher: don’t screw this one up.

It’s an odd thing, the remake. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has a fast turnaround for a reason: to catch those obsessed with the trilogy of books, in time to cash in on them potentially being oblivious to the Swedish films in the first place. Don’t want anyone playing favorites, or making a comparison. If you’re a foreign filmmaker, the only way to keep your property from becoming a footnote to an American remake is to put your stamp all over the thing, and cast it perfectly. Amelie is the best example that comes to mind.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films are not just distinct, they seem an extension of the man himself. Watch Amelie, or Delicatessen, or even Alien: Resurrection, and you’ll have an idea of his sensibilities and personality. The Paris of Amelie is like a pop-up book, bursting with color, humor and music. To remake Amelie, you’d either have to rip him off, or go your own way and risk not being as special. And where would you set Amelie, if not Paris? And who would be your Amelie?  Audrey Tautou brings Amelie to life in the midst of all Jeunet’s stylized artifice. She easily could have let herself be another part of the design (her hair, mouth and eyes are photographed beautifully, but with a lesser actor, would end up just being objects to frame and light). Amelie, like Lisbeth Salander, is a contemporary classic character. Fortunately for Tautou, being French is a huge part of Amelie’s charm. The whimsy and mischievousness of Amelie are rooted, at least partially, in her language and location. Remake a French character that needs to stay French for the film to work? Hollywood’s had almost a decade, and still hasn’t figured it out. Good.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: B+

Amelie: A