dMYD
Starring Rooney Mara
Y
Don’t get your face in a twist, it’s just a murder mystery. It’s Bogart, Chandler and Benedict Cumberbatch, a spooky island, a creepy family and P.Is with problems: it’s Scooby Doo for perverts. A lot’s been written about the revelatory genre additions here (It’s in Sweden!) but essentially this is the same old story (The girl has piercings in her face!) that’s been told a gajallion times before in (She’s a GIRL!) a bafillion different guises and skins, but here done pretty good and with an extra dollop of anal-rape on the top. More of that later. But not literally.
As a film it’s exciting and twisty and intriguing and involving, mainly down to the strength of the source material and characterisation rather than Fincher’s eyes behind the camera. It’s not a big deal, but you get the sense that any workaday dick could have filmed the adaptation in the place of Big Finch, the man who made social networking sexy with all his dim lights and the gentle hands of Aaron Sorkin. That’s not to say he doesn’t manage a perfunctory job; the icy landscape is lit with the same sense of detachment he brought to the Facebook thing, all muted tones and technology sheen, whilst Trent Reznor skits out another brilliantly twinkly soundtrack to make all the nastiness more palatable. This synth bipping extends to the film’s use of technology to update its tale; macbooks and smartphones and flash cars abound, with the irony being that as timeless as the story is, the film will date quicker than Hitler when all’s done and said, which is even more reason to flash in that pan now. Real credit goes to Larsson’s book-work and the sterling efforts of Rooney Mara, shoving herself into the a-list with a performance so iconic and convincing that you forget how stupid her name is. It’s pretty easy to make Oscar bait out of a caricature, but if Heath Ledger deserved a nomination for his lipstick-smudged pencil-pusher then Mara full-heartedly deserves hers, bringing a near-silent derangement and fire-eyed intensity to what’s, for better or worse, one of the iconic characters of this or any other decade.
And that brings us to all the rape. It’s trailblazing, it’s brilliant, it’s disgusting and it’s abhorrent. Whatever your take on the insertion of a filthy reprehensible hell-act into a mainstream Hollywood movie, consider that for aeons now Sylvester Stallone and a thousand others have pumped a near infinite amount of bullets into a group of extras the size of fifteen terracotta armies. Toleration of any kind of violence has been entertainment’s guilty little embarrassment forever, and the fresh use of a new atrocity in something this widely seen is either going to trivialise the issue or incite genuine debate about all sorts of violence glamorisation issues. It’s our choice. As the film says at one point; ‘The court of public opinion rewards bad behavior.’
It’s done now, it’s out there, and like the torture porn and Miley Cyrus and Rambo 4 it’s probably dragging culture down a nasty pit that it’ll never climb out of, but at the very least it’s provided an exciting and independent heroine for the new millennium who’s ruined by the last frame where she fails to get the man of her dreams and presumably rides back to her easy-bake-oven to mop a floor. Great job, everyone involved. An exciting film, some great characters, but difficult to shake that it’s all a fat dead journalist’s liberal wank fantasy.
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