Get By With A Little Help From Your Friends.

Rating: 4/10 (19 October 2013)

I missed the first quarter hour of the film and that may be why I was a little puzzled throughout. I understand that Daniel Craig is a magazine editor offered a lot of money by a millionaire isolate to find out what happened to his daughter many years ago. I understand that Craig enlists the help of a punk delinquent young girl who is a computer whiz.
The problem, if any exists outside of my own head, may lie in the difficult task of translating a novel into a movie. In a novel, we have time to stretch out and get comfortable with the characters, to learn their distinguishing features. A movie by necessity compresses social space and simplifies the story. That's one of the reasons there are so many complaints that "the movie isn't as good as the book," and so few complaints that, "the novel is a waste of time compared to the movie." This must have been a long novel because the disappearance of Harriet, that fourteen-year-old girl, that took place so many years ago, happened in an Agatha Christie setting -- an island from which it was impossible for Harriet to escape and equally unlikely that she was drowned.
So someone on the island probably knows what happened to her, but who? The only people on the island -- now and at the time of the disappearance -- are family members, many of whom are not on speaking terms with one another, for reasons not made too clear. Except for the fact that one of them is an unregenerate Nazi, it's hard to tell one from another. And when you add in the police and big business intrigues, it's like looking into a kaleidoscope. It isn't until a few minutes before the end when things clear up, and the solution turned out to be extremely simple.
One of the resident family is Stellan Skarsgard, who is always impressive, no matter if he's a good guy ("Good Will Hunting") or a bad boy ("Ronin"). He has an easy-going psychotherapeutic demeanor. If a bullet pocks the plaster near his ear (as in "Insomnia"), he just leans slightly away and looks slightly annoyed, as if he'd been pestered by a fly.
Rooney Mara has an important role as the devalued computer expert with the leather jacket, the tattoos, and the pins through her eyebrow, nose, and lips. She lacks eyebrows too but she's no Mona Lisa because she never smiles. Neither does she blink. This gives her a fixed, determined, reptilian glare. And it all adds to the impression that her character has only one note on her instrument. Not even sex seems to arouse her.
It's a long, slow, rather dull mystery with little action, though what there is of it is handled deftly. But I'll bet the novel was interesting because some of the dialog, presumably lifted from the text, is catchy. ("Isn't it odd, that we're more afraid of offending someone than of dying?")