The fundamental challenge in adapting a novel for the screen is narration. In literature, narration blends seamlessly with dialogue and action, allowing the reader to move in and out of characters’ minds and settings. Film cannot direct the viewer as easily as literature can direct the reader, so compromises have to be made. In bad movies, filmmakers will use a voice-over narration to compensate for the lack of interior monologue. After all, why show when you can tell? Good filmmakers thankfully try to find new ways to present all the content of a work of literature, without attempting to mimic the formal structure of a novel. Daniel Alfredson, the director of The Girl Who Played With Fire, sticks to straightforward filmmaking, using the characters and action to tell Stieg Larsson’s story. In doing so, he crafts a quality film, but it is not up to the same level of the novel.
There has been a lot of criticism of Stieg Larsson as a writer—he never uses contractions, every seven words there’s a reference to coffee or sex, and in The Girl Who Stirred the Hornet’s Nest, every female character seems to be wearing the same blandly described red jacket. Despite his limitations as a wordsmith, Larsson’s narration is what makes his novels more than run-of-the-mill airport crime fiction. His Dickensian political and social digressions and use of multiple points of view make the novels great. Without the narration—particularly without the ability to regularly go inside the minds of multiple characters, Alfredson’s film lacks the additional dimension of greatness that the novels have.
Because the film rarely enters the minds of the characters (there are a couple of Lisbeth flashbacks), many of the characters don’t have the same depth in the film as they do in the novel. We never really get a chance to see the struggle between logic and passion that rages inside Lisbeth. She hardly says anything, which often makes her appear dim-witted, rather than the taciturn genius that she is in the novel. Niedermann, the deranged giant who feels no pain, is just a robotic thug in the film; his visions and paranoid thoughts are completely eliminated. Also eliminated is the role of the police as narrators. The story in the film is told entirely through the point of view of Blomkvist and Salander, which makes sense, although it will be interesting to see if Alfredson continues this approach in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, where the police play a much larger role in telling the story.
Even though Alfredson fails to capture the entirety of the novel, he has still made an enjoyable film. Michael Nyqvist is perfect as Blomkvist, alternating between smarmy, righteous, and protective. All the other characters are faithfully portrayed. I particularly enjoyed the actor who played Holger Palmgren’s performance, and the filmmakers did a wonderful job with the makeup to depict Zala’s burn wounds. Like the novel, the film gets a little ridiculous and unbelievable at the end, although Alfredson did a fine job adapting Larsson disappointing cop-out of an ending.
The Girl Who Played With Fire, while not as good as Alfredson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which did a great job adapting a much less cinematically-inclined novel), is still worth a watch. The pace of the film makes it feel much shorter than two hours, much like the pace of the novels make them seem much shorter than 500 pages. Also, there’s not nearly as much butt-rape as in the first film. Whether that’s good or bad is really a matter of personal preference. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give The Girl Who Played With Fire 3 tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.
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