Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, last night
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo out of Sweden was one of those movies people have been talking about all spring. I'd put off seeing it during its lengthy run at the Lyric because it was two hours and thirty minutes long: anything over 2:05 begins to seem like a long movie to me. Ben, the Lyric owner, had seen it and proclaimed that it was a half hour too long. After the movie I agreed with him.
It was an interesting mystery story for much of the movie--a Swedish newspaper reporter is asked to solve a decades-old mystery of a missing young movie---pure Raymond Chandler type stuff.
There is a horrible sexual assault scene---one that the made the teenage girl in front of me cover her eyes. Then there follows, fifteen minutes later, a second much more brutal sexual assault scene with the same characters. Really? I needed to see two in a rows?
The solution to the mystery devolves into a rather trite "racist misogynist madman" theme. I couldn't help thinking that it was really (again) the same movie as Antichrist, but without the ironic twists and artistic sensibilities that make us question our assumptions. No room for that here. The heroine is stone-faced, because she has to be. The patriarchy made her so.
It's all very, very serious. By the end of the film, I figured the entire screenplay could have been written by a Women's Studies Symposium at a northeastern liberal arts college circa 1993, with Scandanavian self-righteousness thrown in for good measure.
It all would have made better sense if I'd only known the Swedish title in advance: it translates to "Men Who Hate Women."
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