Late review - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is a perfectly well made movie that has absolutely no reason to exist.  It adds nothing to the Swedish original, despite being directed by the spiky, visually astute director David Fincher (THE SOCIAL NETWORK).  It feels like just another faithful retelling of Stieg Larsson's best-selling thriller (whose plot I won't bother to recount), albeit with a bigger budget and better production values.  Fincher's fingerprints were too subtly felt.  Let's be honest, if all we'd been given were a music video for Karen O singing Trent Resznor and Atticus Ross' reworking of The Immigrant Song with the wicked cool opening credits, we'd have gone home as happy as if we'd sat through the entire three hour movie. 

If I wanted to get more granular I'd point out the following - two positives and two negative.  I prefer Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander to Noomi Rapace, not because there was anything wrong with Rapace's performance, but because Rapace feels more like a woman, and Mara really does look like a girl (although I concede that in the novel she's 23).  That makes her victimisation worse, her toughness more impressive, her being a ward of the state more credible.  Second, I really liked Jeff Cronenweth's digital lensing using the Red One.

The first negative is a bugbear I have with many English language movies set in a non-English speaking countries.  Simply put, I want the director to decide what he wants to do with the accent in the film and then stick to it consistently.  I don't care if the Yanks and Brits are speaking English with some undefined mittel-europische accent, or some approximation at it, but I don't want half doing straight English and half doing cod-Swedish.   There's nothing that draws me out of a scene more than seeing Daniel Craig speaking straight English to Rooney Mara trying to do a Swedish accent complete with "hey hey"s and whatnot.

My second bugbear is the perfunctory manner in which the relationship between Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist is handled in the remake. In the original movie, the genuine chemistry between Michael Nyqvist and Rapace really did centre the film and make us hungry for the next movie.  But in Fincher's take it's all too superficial, and betrays what's meant to be a deeply emotional moment at the end of the flick.  In fact, the movie has a wider problem, which is the very dull, slightly bizarre (plot points changed for no real reason) ending, that drags on for 30 minutes.

Overall, a pretty banal retelling once the opening credits are done. Looks like Fincher did it for the paycheck and directed with a very light hand.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Israel and Slovenia. It is released on January 6th in Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Estonia, India and Australia. It is released on January 12th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain and Turkey. It is released on January 19th in Belgium, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal. It opens on January 27th in Brazil; on February 3rd in Italy and later in February in Japan.

Rooney Mara won Best Breakthrough Performer, tied with Felicity Jones for LIKE CRAZY, at the National Board of Review awards 2011.

MONEYBALL - Unloved

Brad Pitt as Oakland A's manager Billy Beane and
Jonah Hill as his statistician sidekick Peter Brand. 

Michael Lewis is the chronicler of our age - the man who takes us inside big money, whether on the trading floors of Wall Street (LIAR'S POKER, THE BIG SHORT) or in the soccer and baseball stadiums of America (THE BLIND SIDE, MONEYBALL).  Lewis is the documentarian who shows us who big money distorts ethics and produces outcomes that are inefficient, even from a financial point of view.  In previous novels he took us insides world we didn't know and showed us their glamour and danger.  Heck, LIAR'S POKER was as big a recruiter for Wall Street, as well, WALL STREET.  

The fundamental problem with MONEYBALL is that his big angle is really not that insightful.  Lewis wants to tell us that when baseball managers buy players, they are distorted and prejudiced by all sorts of extraneous and irrelevant information - how good looking a player's girlfriend is an index of self-confidence is - how good he is at doing one thing when really what you're buying him for is something really different.  As a result, Lewis argues that the managers systematically misprice players - overpaying for "stars" and underpaying or plain ignoring the hidden gems. Yes, that's it.  That's the big idea.  And for those of us who are the 1 percent, that's really not revolutionary.  It's just Ben Graham's concept of value investing applied to sport. 

Still, even without a revolutionary idea, MONEYBALL could still have been a good underdog sports movie, of the type that DODGEBALL satirised so well. There is something genuinely romantic about failed player and down on his luck coach Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) taking his two-bit club, the Oakland Athletics, to baseball's greatest winning streak in history, and a genuine contender for the World Series. And, because he didn't have the money to outbid the Yankees for the best players, he had to do it with smarts - with a geeky kid called Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who believed that stats could pick a holistic team of write-offs and turn them into a great and consistent squad. All this in the face of stiff competition from the conservative old guard, particularly coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the rest of the baseball fraternity.  I was expecting a buddy movie - as the handsome jock and nervous geek unite against the world - an underdog movie - a David versus Goliath feelgood epic.  And who cares if I don't know about baseball? I love cricket so much I can appreciate a game suffused with stats, and that chronicles the triumph of the statos over the jocks. 

But no, MONEYBALL turns out to be an utter damp squib of a movie - unloved, uncared for, without a single voice, a single vision, or any conviction about what it's trying to do.  I guess the problem is literally one of rejected parentage. Originally this was a movie that was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (CONTAGION) with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian (the forthcoming GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO).  But then, at the last minute, Soderbergh was axed in favour of Bennett Miller, a relative unknown who hasn't done anything since 2005's CAPOTE, and the script was rewritten by Aaron Sorkin of THE SOCIAL NETWORK fame.  The result is a script and a film that just never finds its groove.  

For the most part the dialogue is flat, and characters ill-fleshed out. There is no charismatic connection between Pitt and Hill.  Pitt does that thing where he thinks he's acting if he constantly eats on screen and squints.  Hill turns out to be utterly uninteresting in a straight, non-comedic role.  Poor Philip Seymour Hoffman barely gets anything to do as the antagonist. We don't feel the stakes. We don't buy Pitt's apparently tragic back story.  His connection with his daughter seems utterly trite. There's  not enough actual gameplay. But then again, I didn't really feel like I knew what the coaches were doing or why certain moneyball tactics were working.  The only flashes of wit and excitement are a couple of scenes where Beane is playing off team's against each other, and another brilliant scene in Boston - scenes that scream Sorkin and jar against the tone of the rest of the film.  One can only imagine what this film might have been with Fincher and Sorkin behind the camera, and maybe Clooney and Gordon-Levitt in front of the camera.  And believe me, you'll be so bored, you'll have plenty of time for such conjecture.

MONEYBALL played Toronto and Tokyo 2011. It was released earlier this year in the US, India, Mexico, Russia, Panama, Iceland, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Japan, Taiwan, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on December 2nd in Finland and Lithuania; on December 8th in Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Sweden and Turkey/ It opens on December 16th in Norway; on December 23rd in Estonia; on January 12th in Portugal; on January 27th in Italy; on February 2nd in Germany and Spain and on February 16th in Singapore.