The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Reading the book and immediately watching the movie has been an interesting excercise. A film adaptation forces a variety of changes onto a story. It must translate literary action into visual action and, even more of a challenge, it must cut the original story and rearrange it so an approximation of it can be told in only a fraction of the time taken to read a novel. It's always interesting to see what choices the film makers made. Sometimes they are able to replicate the original story and characterization. Sometimes they sacrifice character for the flow of plot. Sometimes they add new material to re-characterize people according to who they want or need them to be in the film. And, of course, the tattoo, which in the book only spans the length of the girl's shoulderblade, must be resized to cover her entire back.

While both the book and the film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are good, the film does suffer from a lack of characterization; the scope and subtely of which was a great strength of the novel. The time constraints force a plot which rolls along a little too conveniently with little time available for nuancing character. On the other hand, the book, especially at the beginning, is sometimes slowed with exposition which didn't seem to be all that necessary--It's the sort of book one might be tempted to set back down after fifteen or twenty pages. But it certainly takes off. The film moves along like a rocket. Both deliver an interesting mystery that is ultimately solved by Blomkvist, an out of favour business journalist, and Salander, a socially alienated computer hacker. In the book and the film, they are a great pair and I'm eager to read and watch the next installments in the series.

I will be reading first, however, because the Salander of the book is vastly more interesting that the Salander of the film, who was signifigantly simplified. For instance the film character has never visited her insitutionalized mother--an element which reinforces her alienation--and when she finally does her mother has a plain, answer giving conversation with her, whereas the book character consistently visits her mother, despite her mother's inability to recognize her or provide any coherent commentary on Salander's past. And that makes her much more interesting.