Oscar Contenders #5: Women's Edition

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo + Young Adult

Lisbeth Salander is a rock star. Eerily thin, tattooed and pierced, with jet-black hair, she's both a fierce punk cybergenius and a vulnerable little girl. In the riveting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist calls upon her surveillance services to aid his search for the long-lost Harriet Vanger, likely murdered 36 years before by her family. Lisbeth joins him in work and even in bed, but keeps her distance, forthcoming with research and withholding emotionally. Relative unknown Rooney Mara accentuates Lisbeth's waywardness. She wears the clothes, but underneath the hardened outside, she looks so impossibly young and fragile. Mara's Lisbeth is a palimpsest: a blank state she keeps erasing, to lose herself in.

The character is interesting enough, and Daniel Craig so quietly appealing as Blomkvist, that we don't think too much about the central mystery. The elderly Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, sly as always) recruits him to figure out which family member killed Harriet. To work, Blomkvist takes up residence on the island, a windy wasteland where we expect violence to erupt any moment. And does it ever.

Director David Fincher has never been squeamish, and he doesn't hold back from the more upsetting moments of the books--including sexual violence. Steig Larsson's novel (originally Men who Hate Women in Sweden) depicts a misogynistic world where "an eye for an eye" prevails. How should we react to Lisbeth's comeuppance against her sexual aggressor? Fincher surely revels in her coolness, but does he want us to cheer or cringe? Since he can't sink too deep into the mystery and its twenty-odd suspects, he instead propels the pace forward. The script feels like an adaptation, sure, and the last half-hour's epilogue is a long-drawn-out tangent, but Fincher has a certain touch. He's a rock star, too.

Charlize Theron will have you know she's also a badass. She stretched herself with her 2003 Oscar win for Monster, and hasn't pushed for many huge, A-list blockbusters since. Would she be caught dead in P.S. I Love You or New Year's Eve? Her character in Jason Reitman's new film Young Adult, delusional Mavis Gary, likewise follows her own path. She moves out of her Minnesota small town to glamorous St. Paul, writing a wildly popular YA series. Or so she tells people.

Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody lampoon the Midwestern hicks who aren't capable of leaving town, as well as the arrested development (wink wink) we usually see in Judd Apatow's nerd-bros. They've given infantilism back to the ladies. The problem is that Theron's anti-heroine is one of only two real characters. She shares the movie's best moments with Patton Oswalt's self-pitying Matt, victim of a hate crime in his youth. This odd couple bond (quickly!) over not letting go of their high school woes. Oswalt (sweet and soulful) is the only one Young Adult empathizes with.

Mavis doesn't earn sympathy; she's so deluded in her pursuit of old flame Buddy (Patrick Wilson) that she shouldn't. But Wilson has nothing to play. The filmmakers disdain the small-town Midwest so much, they don't give us real resistance to Mavis's bad spirits. She gets driven out of a bland community she hated to begin with; no big loss. And so Cody's script feels superficially subversive. But Theron, at least, has a knack for finding the comedy within her character's nearly psychotic behavior. When Mavis's man-hunger seems most sad, Theron plays it off with wry nonchalance. A few years back, she might have made a fine Lisbeth Salander.