Sweden, a land of sadistic monsters
The men in Stieg Larrson's Sweden are, with few exceptions, women-hating beasts, finds Andrew M Brown

12 March 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
18 cert, 152 mins

Green Zone
15 cert, 115 mins

Should this adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling thriller have been called Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor in Swedish)? That, rather than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was the original title of both book and film and it describes the dominant theme more accurately. The men in this story are, with few exceptions, monstrous.

To call them misogynists is to drastically understate things. They are vile, abusive fathers, sexual sadists, torturers, multiple murderers. The story contains only one male character you could count on – the stolid hero, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist), a courageous Left-wing reporter who was probably a wish-fulfilment fantasy of the late author (Larsson, who died before his best-selling trilogy was published, was also a radical journalist). The true hero of the movie is the intriguing tattooed girl of the title, Lisbeth Salander, superbly played by Noomi Rapace.

Blomkvist may seem dull, but his principles still get him into trouble. His snooping into the corrupt dealings of a sinister corporation has resulted in his being prosecuted and sentenced to three months in prison. In the easy-going Swedish system, however, he doesn’t have to go straight to jail. So, in the interim, he accepts a job offer from an octogenarian recluse named Henrik Wanger, who lives in an isolated mansion in the frozen north.

Wanger is the senior member of an extended family of super-rich industrialists. He wants Blomkvist to investigate the murder of his beloved niece Harriet, back in 1966. The last known sighting of Harriet before she disappeared is a grainy black and white photograph in which she appears to be staring at somebody out of shot – possibly her killer. The suspects boil down to the other members of the Wanger family. As it happens, they include a number of dedicated Nazis.

Lisbeth insinuates herself into the investigation at this point. She is an exotic, damaged creature who wears black and has multiple piercings. She latches on to Blomkvist, hacking into his computer and following his investigation into the sinister Wanger family. Soon she has joined him at the Wanger compound, where they form an unlikely partnership. Blomkvist is attracted to her, and her extraordinary powers of deduction come in handy too. There’s an idealised and fantastical quality to her freakishness. Lithe, muscular, sexually ambivalent and super-intelligent, she’s a punk superhero. Her dragon tattoo, incidentally, covers her entire back and not only the shoulder as on the cover of the paperback.

This is an atmospheric film, with some nasty scenes of sexual violence. Niels Arden Oplev directs with cool efficiency. But stretched over a leisurely two and a half hours it couldn’t be said to hold the viewer in a vice-like grip. The plot is just as convoluted and implausible as anything dreamed up by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L Sayers. One set-piece even sees all the suspects gathered in a drawing room, as they might be in a “golden age” detective yarn. Nyquist is one of Sweden's leading actors. His performance as Blomkvist is extremely understated and perhaps too self-effacing for audiences used to Hollywood heroes. Rapace, though, is always watchable.

Paul Greengrass’s new action picture The Green Zone is soaked in adrenaline, with the British director’s usual thundering drum beats on the soundtrack and all the juddery camera-work. It’s set in Baghdad in 2003 as hostilities were winding down and attention was turning to the search for weapons of mass destruction.

Brian Helgeland based his screenplay on Imperial Life in the Emerald City by the journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran. He shows the US occupiers who inhabit Saddam’s old Republican Palace inside the Green Zone as bitterly divided. Some, like the CIA veteran Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), insist the Americans must make a deal with the Iraqi army. To Washington, this is anathema.

Matt Damon is in his element here as the hero, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller. Finding that every WMD site his team inspects comes up empty, he ponders: could it be that there’s something wrong with the intelligence provided by the boffins in Washington DC? He decides to go undercover to find out the truth.

He sides with Martin Brown, becoming a sort of rogue agent in the mould of Jason Bourne. And, like Bourne, he finds his own people are out to get him. The principal villains of this movie are not the remnants of the Iraqi army but dissembling civil servants on the US side. Chief among these is Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a Pentagon bureaucrat with a shifty-looking five o’clock shadow. He is handling Iraq’s chaotic transition from a war zone to a democratic future. He embodies all the weaselly politicians who persuaded us Saddam’s Iraq was chock-full of WMDs. And Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a journalist who reported the claims about WMDs, stands for the media who parrotted the government line. It is exciting, intermittently. Greengrass is trying to blend the realism of his gripping film United 93 (2006) with the paranoid thrills of the Bourne franchise – with uneven results.