Epic in length only

Rating: 3/10 (14 July 2010)

The copy of this I rented has the presentation of a feature film, but I think it may have been edited from a Swedish television series adapting a trilogy of novels, of which this is the first. This version is a little over two and a half hours, but the IMDb notes that there is a fuller three hour version which I'm guessing might have been the original TV presentation. What was in that extra half hour? It might contain material that answers some of the criticisms I make below, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
The basic plot is that an investigative journalist, smarting from losing a libel case brought by a corrupt businessman, and facing a jail sentence (for libel? They must do things differently in Sweden), is hired by a wealthy businessman impressed with his integrity to investigate the disappearance, decades earlier, of his niece. The businessman is convinced (for reasons that are not entirely clear) that she must have been murdered by a member of his family (note that this is a very old-fashioned family-based capitalist enterprise, on the Buddenbrooks model).
With over two and half hours to explore, one might hope for some real plot and character development and some fine dramatic scenes, but the drama is almost entirely dead. Here are some of the things we don't get (I could list more, but am avoiding spoilers):
We get very little idea what the family enterprise actually is. There's a photo of a ship;are they shipbuilders, perhaps? Or are they just exporting goods?
Though the family are mostly gathered on the island, and the investigator assembles a handy photographic family tree, we scarcely get to meet most of them, even less witness any dramatic interplay between them. I remember one scene only in which the family actually get together to attempt to deter the investigator.
We have been assured by the patriarch that the family are greedy, grasping,selfish vipers, but we are treated to none of the dramatic or satirical fun that might come from this.
Though the island has great symbolic significance, it has no cinematic presence at all. The bridge that we are assured is the only way on or off the island might just as well be a bridge across a river for all the difference it makes.There is little sense of remoteness, isolation or confinement.
There is a dark undercurrent of previous Nazi involvement. But this is just stated baldly, as a fact. We get very little idea of what this meant or even really when it was. During the war? Neo-nazi revivalism? Both? And apart from the fact that we can take it as given that Nazis are nasty people, there is no attempt to explore how this actually affects their actions and beliefs.
More simply, what we have here is the Swedish equivalent of an English country house murder, basically dealing with the rich and privileged, and with the cast of suspects conveniently assembled in a single location. But instead of the detective teasing out the solution by interrogating the suspects, playing them off against each other, and catching them out, all we get is seemingly endless shots of the investigator or his computer-whiz sidekick tap-tap-tapping away on their laptops (Apple Macs, if you must know, and heaven knows you get long enough to admire the speed and smoothness of the software).
Look, I know that the Internet and cheap computing has brought about a revolution in thinking and behaving and that film-makers are struggling to come to terms with it, but let me propose a general working rule for film-makers. Computers are not dramatically interesting.
It's like voice-over. You can get away with it a bit, and sometimes it can even enhance a film; but if you find yourself relying on the voice-over, then chances are you've gone wrong. You're failing to tell the story properly in the medium of cinema, and if it's just a straight narration, your audience would be better off reading a book. So it is with computers and internet investigations. You can have a secondary character who's a computer expert, or you can have one episode of intensive computer use if the plot absolutely requires it. But if you find that the whole drama relies on it, or worse, that you have to fill all your screen-time showing it, then you can be sure you've gone badly wrong. Your audience would be better off surfing the net themselves, or composing electronic music, or photoshopping their snapshots, or playing games.
What was that? Oh, yes, the sidekick. Well, that's the woman "with the dragon tattoo", though why she has it I still don't know. It's just the title of the film. She's a young lesbian punk, though hilariously, as in every middle-aged liberal man's fantasy, the investigator succeeds in "turning" her just by the sheer non-sexist force of his personality. Oddly enough, she has her own sub-plot, involving a corrupt "probate guardian" (I think that's a subtitle mistranslation for parole or probation officer), which is much more interesting than the main story, but over rather quickly. This I think, properly scripted, would have made a much more rewarding film of about the standard 90 minute length.
And the libel case comes back at the very end, though bizarrely it seems to have nothing to do with the main story. True enough, life's generally not like that, and not everything is connected, but it is characteristic of the scriptwriter's complete absence of any sense of drama that this opportunity to create some dramatic unity is muffed.
The flashes of sexual violence, just about acceptably presented as would befit a television programme, are nothing more than a desperate attempt to inject some artificial edginess into this ditchwater dull plodding drama.