The Man Who Left Too Soon

by Barry Forshaw

  Salander, working for Armansky again, investigates a building associated with Zalachenko and notices a nauseating stench in a workroom. She pushes a rod into a pool of stagnant water and a decomposing corpse rises to the surface. She lets the body sink back and discovers something that might have been another corpse. Then she hears a noise. ‘Hello little sister,’ says a cheerful voice. It is the monstrous Niedermann, with a large knife in his hand. He casually informs his horrified listener of all the diversionary tactics he has used since his disappearance – and he, needless to say, is responsible for the brutal murders. (‘All women were whores. It was that simple.’)

  Larsson has, of course, been saving up his most powerful violent confrontation for the end of the book, and what follows is a spectacularly exciting orgy of violence in which Niedermann begins to feel that Salander is a supernatural force and a monster. With his feet nailed to the floor by his smaller opponent, he finds himself with a nail gun held to his spine, just below the nape of his neck. The suspense is rigidly maintained, as Lisbeth quickly reviews in her mind all the things that this grotesque psychopath has done. But she lowers the weapon. She tells the police where he is, and one wonders if, all along, Larsson had planned for this radical change in the modus operandi of his, usually implacable, heroine. Does this represent a humanising of her? If so, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that we have been invited to enjoy the unfettered blood-letting unleashed by his protagonist against thoroughly deserving monsters, so it is perhaps a little rich to think that we can accept her new change of heart. Nevertheless, it is a highly satisfying, almost-final glimpse of the character.

  Salander is at home in the bath when the doorbell rings; she is annoyed but finds that it is Blomkvist. ‘Hello’ he says. She does not answer. He tells her that he thought she would like to know that Ronald Niedermann is dead, murdered by a gang. He had been tortured and slit open with a knife. ‘Jesus,’ replies Salander. The mob was arrested but put up quite a fight. And the biker surrendered at 6 o’clock. He asks what she was doing. ‘I was in the bath,’ she replies. He has bought bagels and some espresso coffee. What he is offering is just company. He is a good friend who is visiting a good friend – ‘If I’m welcome, that is.’ She realises that this man who has been so much a part of her life for several years is someone she knows all the secrets of – just as he knows all of hers. She also realises that she has no feelings for him – at least not ‘those kind of feelings’. And it no longer hurts her to see him.

  Larsson then gives us the final line of the trilogy (as it currently exists): ‘She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.’ It is, in fact, a highly satisfying ending to the novel in every conceivable way. The reader needs this emotional release after the nigh-operatic outbursts of violence and labyrinthine plotting, counter-plotting, betrayal and deception. But it is not the kinetic diversions of the narrative that one is finally left with but the relationship between the two brilliantly realised central characters. It is a measure of Larsson’s considerable achievement that it is this emotional connection rather than all the crowd-pleasing action that is the backbone of the Millennium Trilogy.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE FILMS

  It was, of course, only a matter of time before filmmakers took advantage of the immensely cinematic properties of Larsson’s work, and it is perhaps appropriate that a Swedish company was the first to take the plunge – and enjoyed considerable success by doing so. Yellow Bird is the production company that first optioned The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – and carried the project through to a critically acclaimed, and commercially successful, result. The company’s main offices are in Stockholm, but the partners launched a subsidiary, Yellow Bird Pictures, in Munich. The company was originally founded by the Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell and producers Ole Søndberg and Lars Björkman in order to create films inspired by Mankell’s highly thought-of Kurt Wallander novels. It was subsequently bought by Zodiac Entertainment (located in Denmark) in 2007, and was cannily involved in a co-production deal with the company responsible for the British Wallander series starring Kenneth Branagh.

  Thankfully, the company was not content with simply filming the crime novels of one Swedish master and began to look further afield to swell its portfolio. Its 2009 film of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – now prefixed by the word Millennium – proved to be a highly creditable stab at the late author’s work. Needless to say, a considerable amount of filleting was necessary for a novel so crammed with incidental detail – along with a certain compression of character. But this surgery was performed by director Niels Arden Oplev and screenwriters Nikolai Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg with great intelligence and a keen understanding of Larsson’s literary strategies.

  A commendable decision was made in keeping the steady, accumulative pace of Larsson’s writing rather than injecting synthetic excitement and incident. The result is that when passages of violence occur in the film they have considerably greater impact: a good example is the sexual assault by the corrupt Bjurman on Salander – forcing her to fellate him – and her subsequent violent revenge with dildo and tattoo needle. While the violence and sexual encounters (consensual and otherwise) are powerful, they are relatively discreet by contemporary standards, and one wonders if Larsson might have preferred something totally uncompromising along the lines of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. However, the matching of actor to character is exemplary, with both Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist strongly cast as Salander and Blomkvist. Interestingly, there has been a certain negative reaction to the physical attractiveness (or otherwise) of the leading actors: Noomi Rapace is almost always deliberately alienating in her appearance as Lisbeth (although the actress is appropriately striking as the new-look blonde Lisbeth after performing her ‘feminising’ makeover at the end of the film). But it is possible to speculate that the mental image readers might maintain of Larsson’s heroine – rebarbative behaviour, tattoos and facial jewellery but compelling and fascinating in her sexual omnivorousness – is really more feasible on the page than in the more reductive arena of the cinema.

  Regarding Michael Nyqvist’s Blomkvist, it might be argued that a man so sexually attractive to women – even though the film cuts down on the number of his sexual conquests – might have been represented by a more charismatic actor with, it has to be said, less markedly pitted skin. But that is not to criticise Nyqvist’s trenchant and subtle performance, always intelligent and truthful.

  While utterly modern in its trappings, there are some pleasing reminders in the film of Sweden’s great cinematic past: one of Ingmar Bergman’s most considerable actresses, Gunnel Lindblom, makes a brief appearance as a frosty matron of the Vanger family, while Sven-Bertil Taube (of Jonas Cornell’s Hugs and Kisses) beautifully – and movingly – renders the more sympathetic Henrik Vanger.

  I spoke to leading British film critic Kim Newman, who was one of those impressed by the film, describing it as ‘an extremely satisfying mix of mystery, detection, psychosis and social criticism with fully engaging lead performances’. He went on: ‘It’s no wonder these characters and situations have been so resonant and successful throughout Europe. It takes its time with the separate stories of the protagonists – Mikael is a long-time social campaigner working for a radical magazine, who is forced to cut loose from his circle (Millennium is the magazine he works for) so as not to drag them down, while Lisbeth has to cope with a sexually abusive social worker (played by Björn Granath) and her own simmering rage as she is intrigued against her will by the fact that she sees through a part of the puzzle that has resisted solution for decades. In typical Swedish fashion, it’s no big deal that the unlikely partners in detection start having sex, but a huge thing when they finally hold hands. The eventual revelation of who the culprits are in the crimes isn’t that surprising, but does lead to an unusual moment in which the hero is in jeopardy in the killer’s torture room and the girl not only comes to his rescue but gives chase when th
e baddie tries to get away.’

  Newman continued: ‘Lisbeth Salander – the girl with the dragon tattoo – has become a major literary heroine, and the unusual-looking, intense Rapace is liable to become an international star off the back of this role (which she’s reprised in the two follow-ups). She’s the most important Euro action heroine to emerge since Anne Parillaud’s Nikita, and an interesting mix of credibly screwed-up victim (her parricidal back story emerges in fragments) and resourceful super-heroine (after her probation officer rapes her, she exacts fitting revenge with a camcorder, a stun-gun, a dildo and a tattoo needle).

  ‘The Swedish title (Men Who Hate Women) hints at the sin which binds together the major and minor villains, and there’s certainly a feeling for the pattern of misogyny and abuse that has wrought the long-lasting evils. But it’s also good on procedural stuff, with clues tracked down in old photographs and newspaper archives and an exhilarating on-the-trail strand as Mikael and Lisbeth uncover a 1950s serial killer in the family history, but also pick up on traces left behind by the elusive, presumed-dead-but-perhaps-not girl whose disappearance has kicked off the plot.’

  Newman added: ‘It occurred to me that the Blomkvist – Salander team is an effective update of the Steed – Mrs Peel dynamic in The Avengers, with the mature man representing decent values and traditions and the younger woman aggressively modern and independent. It’s just that now our idea of decent values are those of a 1960s liberal leftie rather than an old Etonian fighter pilot.’

  Using members of the same creative team, Books 2 and 3 were also adapted by Yellow Bird in 2009. The Girl Who Played with Fire takes an interesting approach in forging the second film in a pre-sold sequence, maintaining a respect for the books but adopting a markedly different, cooler tone to that of the first movie. The original cast is satisfyingly in place, though the director this time is Daniel Alfredson. As befits the novel’s passionate concern for women’s rights, that theme is foregrounded here, though the orchestration of tension in the various set pieces is less sure-footed. The palpable hit that the film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became (it is now comfortably the most successful Swedish-language film of all time) pointed up the problem of how to adapt its successor, The Girl Who Played with Fire. The narrative structure of the film is more straightforward and less nuanced than its predecessor, with the parameters for the novel’s central conspiracy against Lisbeth, falsely accused of three murders, nicely delineated, along with massive explosions of bloody violence – but with a temperature-dropping sense that, to some extent, the narrative is ‘marking time’ before the resolution of the final film. Like the novel, the film assumes that the audience will be aware of the bond already established between Salander and Blomkvist – a bond doggedly resisted by her and fought for by him – which essentially means that viewers who have not seen the first film will not understand the essence of the relationship; the protagonists do not meet until the climax, when Salander is lying on the ground, bruised and bleeding (the deferring of this moment, needless to say, gives it considerable emotional force). There is a counterpoint to the shocking scene of sexual abuse in the first film with a graphic lesbian encounter between Lisbeth and her sometime-lover Miriam Wu (shocking to those disturbed by such things, that is; this is a consensual encounter). The casting of the principal villains is hit or miss: Micke Spreitz is perfect as the hulking, impervious-to-pain blonde giant Niedermann, although the Bond villain characteristics are perhaps too obvious on screen, but Georgi Staykov is notably too young as the monstrous Russian paterfamilias, with burn make-up that recalls a low-rent horror film.

  The final film – the adaptation of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, by the same director as the second movie – is perhaps a disappointment after its predecessors. The first two films accommodated Larsson’s somewhat prolix plotting by utilising brisk cutting and condensing the narrative strands, but here Daniel Alfredson seems to feel that the tortuous plot, and much of the dialogue, needs to be given its head – and that is not to the film’s advantage in terms of pacing. The tautness of the first film is undoubtedly dissipated. Nevertheless, it’s a solid adaptation that does justice to the resolution of Lisbeth’s story – even if the knitting together of elements in the finale seems a touch abrupt. In some ways, the last of the Millennium Trilogy adaptations is reminiscent of another of the successes of the production company responsible, Sweden’s Yellow Bird: the original Henning Mankell Wallander television series. There is the same low-key, reined-in playing by the cast, resolutely non-tourist venue location shooting, and the steady accretion of facts and information through which the narrative unfolds (in contrast to the more straightforward, in-your-face style of most American television series and movies). Of course, this aspect of the film most clearly reveals its origins as a Swedish television series, but it is none the worse for that; the reverse, in fact, as it is a refreshing antidote to the hyper-dramatic, unsubtle style of most contemporary thrillers.

  As in the previous films in the sequence, the necessary telescoping of events and characters to whittle things down to an acceptable screen running length is done with intelligence and skill, and even has the effect (as in the adroit adaptation of the first book) of lending the plot – almost by accident – a greater level of plausibility. And in the same way in which Mikael Blomkvist’s unlikely list of sexual conquests is reduced to a more persuasive number in the first movie, another credibility-challenging element is finessed at the beginning of the film of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest: although the severely injured, groggy Lisbeth, lying bandaged in her hospital bed after the removal of a bullet from her head, is made aware that her murderous father is in the same hospital, the nocturnal prowlings by Zalachenko are removed. Although, of course, readers of the books will be surprised by this change – one among many – however intelligent the motivation behind it. Similarly, the business of the poison pen e-mails received by a worried Erika Berger has been altered – the immense complexity of the original plot may have been profitably simplified here once again, but it is to the credit of the filmmakers that they have been bold enough to take this initiative.

  The film of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, of course, boasts two James Bond-style villains, who are more reminiscent of their literary, and cinematic, antecedents when portrayed on the screen by actors than they are on the printed page. Lisbeth’s grotesquely mutilated father, for instance, given to sinister Blofeldian laughter in order to convey his malign nature, and the implacable, superhuman giant Niedermann, whose body count in this final entry virtually goes off the scale. We see – briefly – several of Niedermann’s luckless, often bound victims as he is en route to his objective, his half-sister – and the fact that we are not shown their subsequent murders is chillingly effective. But – as those who know the novel are aware – Zalachenko is speedily (and bloodily) dispatched when he becomes a thorn in the side of the rogue secret service agents in Swedish intelligence who have been protecting him. And while the hulking Niedermann once again presents problems of plausibility, he is a useful element in a narrative that proceeds at a much more stop-and-start pace than its two predecessors. After the court case in which Lisbeth is finally exonerated (a lengthy sequence handled, incidentally, with real skill), her hulking half-brother is still around for a satisfyingly violent confrontation, a characteristically pulse-raising sequence that audiences perhaps need after the statelier pace of the courtroom drama. Director Daniel Alfredson resists the temptation to show us Niedermann’s death – at the hands of vengeful bikers rather than Lisbeth, although his feet have been nail-gunned to the floor by his half-sister – keeping it as information we merely hear reported briefly. If this isn’t particularly cathartic for the viewer, it’s still dramatically effective.

  Even more than in the previous films in the trilogy, the talented Noomi Rapace (who moved on to the second Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movie after this, playing the part of a gypsy) is obliged to convey acres o
f meaning while constantly maintaining an inexpressive, masklike face – and the fact that she does so with such understated force is characteristic of the actress’s skill. A particular pleasure is watching her struggle with the natural, human impulse to thank people who deserve her thanks – especially Blomkvist and his sister, Annika Giannini, who handles Lisbeth’s defence with little help from her client – this is clearly torture for the undemonstrative Salander. And Lisbeth’s striding into the courtroom in full-on Goth gear, with gelled hair, outrageous make-up and chains, rather than a more courtroom-friendly suit, is a lovely Boudicca-into-battle moment. (Even with her future freedom on the line, Lisbeth remains ineluctably more fuck-you than conciliatory.)

  If the final encounter between Lisbeth and Blomkvist after the case has been won lacks the touching quality of its original literary template, and has no real valedictory feel, unlike the moving end of the third book, it is nevertheless handled with understanding and nuance. Perhaps audiences expecting a more dramatic or affecting conclusion to the film trilogy will have reservations, but once again the adaptation – largely speaking and with some important caveats – does justice to the original.

  It’s hardly surprising that even in France and Sweden (the initial marketplaces for the three Millennium films), the Hollywood dream casting game has been played by cinema-goers. For the inevitable forthcoming Hollywood remake, a slew of names were initially evoked: Natalie Portman, Kristen Stewart and Ellen Page for Lisbeth, and (for Blomkvist) George Clooney and Brad Pitt – although both actors invariably figure in such speculative casting. In fact, Daniel Craig, on sabbatical from James Bond after the financial woes of the MGM studio put the franchise on hold, looks set to be the first English-speaking Blomkvist in David Fincher’s adaptation, with the hitherto little-known Rooney Mara taking on the role of Lisbeth.