What is Skye Watching?

I've been watching with great interest the three Swedish-made adaptations of Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. My husband and I caught an advance showing of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at Chicago's European Film Festival, where it was sold out well in advance, weeks before it was released in the US. At that point only the first two books of the series were available in English, and readers were reacting to the cliffhanger that ended The Girl Who Played With Fire. "I just don't know," said the little old lady in front of us in line, "It didn't seem very realistic...crawling out of that grave." Well, I thought, that would depend on how much you wanted to kill your father.

Now, before any criticisms are launched at the films, it must first be acknowledged that Noomi Rapace is a phenomenal actress. She has intelligence, wit, style, gravitas, and above all else, range. Whatever flaws the films might have, she is not their cause. Truly I cannot imagine anyone capturing Lisbeth's character as well as Rapace has. She manages, in all three films to capture Lisbeth's true nature--she is not "autistic," as she is called more than once, she is battle-weary, emotionally wounded, and socially repressed. She also manages to capture the subtle growth that Lisbeth experiences from the first installation to the last, growing from as Aranovsky says "treating your friends like shit," to allowing the DVD of her brutal rape to be used at her trial in her defense. It's a kind of growth that would have been very easy to let slide. I cannot wait to see her in future films.

In many ways the films do capture the nature of the books, for better and for worse. The first book, and thus the first film, as has been said many times before, resemble an Agatha Christie novel. It presents a self-contained mystery, set on an island, no less. If you didn't know that there were more books and films to come, you might not even know that Lisbeth's story is actually more important than Blomkvist's murder investigation. But even in this first, self-contained, film, there are important omissions. Lisbeth's hacking activities are greatly overlooked, for instance, as is the subplot between Blomkvist and Erika, which makes it hard to understand why Lisbeth cuts off her relationship with Blomkvist the way she does. There is also, if possible, too much foreshadowing, with scenes showing twelve-year-old Lisbeth dousing her father in gasoline and flicking a match, long before those memories are relevant to the plot. That said, the first movie is far and away the most successful, and it is the only one that can stand on its own.

The second book was more complicated than the first; the second film was not. In all fairness, neither the second book nor the second film can be judged alone. They must be judged in conjunction with the third. If the first book is reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, the second and third remind one of an old school, cold war spy novel...John Le Carre, perhaps. The second and third books, and films, are about the uncovering of a conspiracy--through hacking, through reading documents, and through interviewing leads. All of which make for pretty good reading, if one's interested in research, journalism, and political conspiracy... but not the greatest film. There are also two subplots, one involving the media's construing Lisbeth as a sexual deviant, and one involving Erika's career changes, that add interest and texture to the books, but were left out of the film. Possibly the filmmakers thought one lesbian sex scene to be enough, but not so! Both the second book and film do have some action, leading up to the painful scene in which Lisbeth spends hours sneaking into her father's farmhouse, only to have him tell her that she set off every motion detector on the property. He then takes her out to the grave dug by her "blonde tank" half brother Neidermann and, when she tries to run away, carefully shoots her three times: twice to disable her, and once to kill. Despite the little old lady's objections, Lisbeth apparently wants to kill her father very badly, because she claws her way out of the grave and manages to strike him in the head with an axe. This is when Blomkvist shows up and, in the book, in a moment of great tenderness, staunches Lisbeth's wounds with duct tape, an innovation the surgeon congratulates him for. Clearly, someone was a boy scout.

What is missing from the third film, which my husband and I saw last week, is detail. Detail about Lisbeth's surgery, detail about Blomkvist's slow uncovering of the conspiracy, detail about Lisbeth's autobiography, and detail about her trial. In the book all these things are quite complicated--the mystery slowly reveals itself through careful research and fiendishly clever hacking; in the film they appear much, much, too simple. Of course, if the film had given me the detail I so desperately wanted, it probably would have been six hours long. As much as I wouldn't have minded that, I understand why cuts had to me made. My disappointment is that they cut so much that they completely destroyed the slow revelation of the mystery, which, in the book, is compelling. It's true, though, that this book is not like the others--Lisbeth spends it lying in a hospital bed and then sitting in jail, not kicking ass like we're used to. This was hard to adjust to in the book, and it's a fatal flaw in the movie, which critics, such as my husband, describe as "boring." In the book, though, it all comes together in a trial in which Lisbeth, with the help of Blomkvist's sister Annika, presents a brilliant defense and kicks some (metaphorical) patriarchical ass and gain her independence. In the movie the trial does not come off as brilliant, but rather haphazard and almost "lucky." Lisbeth is saved not because of Blomkvist's months of research and her hacking skills, but because her friend Plague manages to hack just the right computer at just the right time and provide just the right evidence to impeach the lead witness for the prosecution. It's almost as if the movie is too subtle in its depiction of the trial--we see so little use of Lisbeth's autobiography, so few incidents of Telborian accusing her of paranoid schizophrenia, that there almost isn't a "hah! Who's a paranoid schizophrenic now!" moment when Telborian is proved to be a liar. I didn't hate the movie--I got to see Lisbeth in full mufti, after all--but for me it just didn't do the book justice.