Lessons of Darkness

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): B+

Subpar material gets a tonal and aesthetic – and, by extension, thematic – boost from directorial virtuosity in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher’s American remake of the Stieg Larsson best-seller that was first adapted for the screen in its native Sweden, to largely dismal results, in 2009. Working from Steven Zaillian’s sharply modulated script, Fincher hews closely to his source material’s narrative, which fixes on the investigation by disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) into the decades-old death of Harriet Vanger, who disappeared without a trace from her family’s island home and whom wealthy scion Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) believes was offed by a member of his wretched, Nazi-populated family (which includes Stellan Skarsgård’s heir apparent). This quest eventually compels Mikael to enlist the services of punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), whom in the most significant of many subtle changes Fincher and Zaillian make to their tale, is eloquently fleshed out into a three-dimensional human being, rather than the super-goth-badass caricature that Noomi Rapace brought to grating life in Niels Arden Oplev’s substandard original film.

Fincher shoots Lisbeth in alienating compositions (behind her head, to the side of the frame) to capture the way in which she – most obviously via her mohawk, leather get-ups, and piercings – has retreated within herself as a defense mechanism against a lifetime of male abuse, and Mara embodies her with a stoic anger that’s muted by a constant look of hurt, vulnerability and fear in her wide-open eyes. Lisbeth feels real in this Dragon Tattoo without ever seeming any less imposing or intimidating a figure of righteous fury, and Craig matches Mara’s nuanced performance with his own delicately reserved turn, making Mikael less an unctuous know-it-all than – as with an undercurrent about Harriet’s religiosity that dovetails with Mikael’s own daughter’s turn toward faith – a lost soul in desperate search of clarity and purpose. It’s Fincher, however, who’s most responsible for this version’s overriding form/content improvements. The director refuses to shy away from the material’s more tawdry, titillating rape-and-violence elements, and yet even during said moments, he rigorously prioritizes characters’ frenzied emotions above salacious nudity and nastiness – a fact most stunningly felt in the infamous assault sequence between Lisbeth and her vile legal guardian (Yorick van Wageningen), a scene that oozes otherworldly dread (the camera panning away from the bedroom’s closed door) while sticking, with piercing intensity, to Lisbeth’s anguished countenance.

As befitting a Fincher film, the opening credit sequence – here, a motif-laden montage of inky keyboards, computer plugs, flowers, dragons, and faces in agonized screams being shattered by fists – is alone worth the price of admission, and the same can be said of Trent Reznor’s score of unholy, pulsating electronic rhythms. Dragon Tattoo’s steely, color-filtered palette eerily evokes the story’s portrait of a present turned ashen by crimes of the past, and Fincher’s propulsive editing (often moving the story forward at a breakneck pace sans dialogue) and ominously gliding cinematography create an atmosphere of inevitable doom and heartache even for those who might, in terms of the story’s nominal whodunit plot, eventually triumph. It’s a film that’s directed with such dexterity, confidence and exacting attention to conveying mood and theme through visual and aural means that it manages the feat – one not just considerable but, on the basis of its Swedish predecessor, seemingly impossible – of turning what was transparently scandalous and simplistic anti-misogynistic, women-and-their-troublesome daddies material into a sleek, sumptuous vision of wounded people searching, with varying degrees of success, to find salvation through human connection.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011): B+

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film about death, and the dead men who willingly and hopelessly ensnare themselves in lies, subterfuge and detached amorality. Condensing John le Carré’s seminal 1974 spy novel (originally adapted into an Alec Guinness-headlined 1979 BBC miniseries) into an efficient, chilly feature-length gem of formal rigor and atmospheric bleakness, director Tomas Alfredson’s espionage yarn roots itself in the fall of post-WWII British imperial/military dominance via the figurative resurrection of secret agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman), who’s brought back into the fold of the MI6 (“the Circus”) – after having been let go for a mission gone awry a year earlier – to uncover a Russian mole within his covert group. That mission necessitates unraveling a web of deceit involving Hungarian defectors, Russian double-agents and a bevy of possible traitors-within-his-midst, an anxious and claustrophobic universe that Alfredson visualizes with austere, methodical cinematography comprised of compositions awash in harsh angular lines and constricting geometric shapes. Bolstered by a superb cast and – through a recurring flashback to an MI6 Christmas party that captures the depressing absurdity of these spooks’ existence – a very subtle, sly black-humor drollness, Tinker Tailor generates tension from both its aesthetic and narrative stillness. In the same vein, Oldman’s Smiley boasts an outward placidness that can’t quite mask the chest-gripping pain of his wife’s (and cohorts’) betrayal. With the actor’s subtle, evocative modulations of expression and comportment working in tandem with Alfredson’s deft editorial structure (full of gliding, graceful montages), it’s a film that conveys a hauntingly cynical view of a world in which allegiances are illusory, ethics and loyalty are unreliable, and one’s efforts to affect change – positively or negatively – make little, if any, lasting impact.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011): B+

Credit motion-capture technology for reinvigorating Steven Spielberg, who with The Adventures of Tintin (produced by Peter Jackson, who will direct its forthcoming sequel) recaptures the same buoyant, childlike B-movie zest that powered his first three Indiana Jones efforts. Never has the oft-derided animation process been put to better use than in this faithful imagining of Hergé’s iconic mystery-solving boy reporter Tintin (Jaime Bell), whose signature upturned coiffure, long coat and exclamations (“Holy Snakes!”) are brought to life with a bracing blend of photorealism – also found in the faces of its supporting characters (note a Moroccan bazaar’s populace) and exotic locales – and pliable rubbery cartoonishness. The effect is a surprisingly entrancing mix of the real and unreal, a technological achievement that’s more than matched by Spielberg’s direction. With his virtual “camera” zooming, plummeting, spinning and soaring about its expertly detailed environs, Spielberg takes full advantage of not only CG’s anything-goes potential but also of 3D, as the director – from a beautiful silhouetted credit sequence to centerpieces involving car chases, plane derring-do, and nautical hijinks – creates thrilling, dynamic tension between foreground and background.

Written by Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright (and boasting the same gonzo energy found in the latter’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World), The Adventures of Tintin sends its hero on a quest regarding a long-sunken pirate ship’s treasure sought by villainous Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig). Paired with Haddock (Andy Serkis), the always-drunk descendant of the mysterious ship’s captain, Tintin embarks on an adventure that plays to Spielberg’s fondness for the relationship between men and their male forbears, though action and humor are the thing in this rollicking saga, which comingles mile-a-minute thrills and gags to a point that borders on the frenzied. Even so, the sheer vibrancy of Tintin’s stout resourcefulness and bulbous-nosed Haddock’s sloshed intrepidness do much to lend the proceedings a decidedly human center. Like the Indiana Jones films, Tintin boasts a wide-eyed fondness for tales involving ancient buried fortunes, plentiful globetrotting, and predicaments that – as with the pursuit of a pickpocket by Tintin and bumbling twin cops Thompson (Simon Pegg) and Thompson (Nick Frost) – meld danger with slapstick comedy. That marriage reaches a crescendo during a harried pursuit through Moroccan streets that’s captured in one prolonged shot – a sequence that, no matter the digital trickery involved, is a pure marvel of sustained choreography, imagination and pulse-pounding excitement.

The Descendants (2011): C+

Alexander Payne takes the easy way out time and again in The Descendants, a tale that wants to be mature but can’t help shortchanging its drama through constant reliance on its protagonist’s unimpeachable nobility. Lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) is a man faced with two unavoidable deadlines regarding his need to let go of the past: his wife is in a fatal coma and has a pull-the-plug living will that must soon be executed, and his family’s enormous centuries-old real estate holdings must by law be sold. The former is hardly a choice, and the latter’s outcome is never in question – especially since Matt is encouraged early on by a local woman to not sell his land, and he later visits the property and is told (foreshadowing!) by his youngest daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) that she wishes she could have camped there like her mother and older sister Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) did. On top of these issues, as well as Scottie’s profane acting-out in school and Alexandra’s drunken troublemaking, Matt’s in-crisis life is thrown for a further loop when he learns that his wife was cheating on him before her catastrophic accident, a plot twist that might have worked in this overcrowded script (based on Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel) if it hadn’t turned out that her extramarital paramour (Matthew Lillard) had intimate, and thoroughly contrived, ties to Matt’s land deal. Payne’s direction is competent but his depiction of Hawaii as a place of both everyday suburban normalcy and great beauty would have struck a stronger chord if that point weren’t overtly articulated by the film’s unnecessary and lazy intro narration. Similarly, Clooney’s performance treads a winning line between serious pathos and comedic likability, yet his Matt is too often driven not by real anger, frustration and vengeance as much as fantasy-land holier-than-thou dignity and decency. Consequently, the film’s portrait of both letting go and embracing one’s family and heritage (replete with more than one sequence of Matt staring at sepia-hued ancestral photos) repeatedly fails to find a true emotional note – a fact never more stark than in Matt’s wholly unbelievable decision to be accompanied on his various dramedic shenanigans by Alexandra’s dim-witted friend Sid (Nick Krause), with whom Matt eventually bonds in a scene of near-stunning phoniness.