The music of the mechanics of the investigation

A man, recently humiliated for making unsubstantiated accusations against a public figure, is brought to a remote, frozen corner of Northern Sweden, an island of vast manors inhabited by the aging members of an industrial dynasty, some of them one-time Nazis, few of whom talk to each other anymore. The man has been asked by one of the family elders to research his memoir, but the real purpose of the research seems to be to discover what happened to a 16-year-old niece who vanished back in 1966.

As the man gets deeper into his increasingly precarious task (many within the family aren’t nice to him; one even shoots at him) he hires a young woman as an assistant—the same young woman who did an extremely thorough background check on the man for the family elder. Turns out they make a great team: he’s cool but affable, ruggedly handsome in his heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with a pale, orphan-child face, multiple piercings and tatts, and, at times, an invincible mohawk. (How does her hair stay so vertical after wearing a motorcycle helmet?) The film they’re in has little time for conventional character development, so our rapid registering of their peculiar, quiet chemistry is important. The characters are embodied by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, whose performances, defined by such distinct choices in body language, appear effortless, or rather, all about attending to the task at hand. And that’s the sensibility driving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a nutshell: telling a story one task at a time; process, procedure, efficiency.

The hiring of director David Fincher for the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulpy, often tawdry international bestseller is inspired. Very few filmmakers could simultaneously manage a production of this scale and bring to it such personal, unfussy finesse. Early scenes snow us with exposition and flashbacks, yet we get everything we need to, and even if we don’t it’s all quite compelling. There’s a great deal of ordinary work up on screen: googling, highlighting documents, scanning photos, thumbing through files, and all of it clips along like the tip-tapping of a crash cymbal. The mystery at the heart of this is genuinely interesting, the resolution pretty satisfying, but what animates The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the music of the mechanics of the investigation itself.

Fincher’s work underwent a seismic breakthrough with 2007’s Zodiac—a mystery that doesn’t even have a resolution!—and this new film takes its cues from that film, as well as 2010’s The Social Network. All these films are on the long side, all of them crammed with plot, all of them hugely dependent on pace, rhythm, dynamics, adrenaline. Dragon Tattoo isn’t the deepest thing Fincher’s made (its serial killer’s gimmicky showmanship mirrors one of the corniest/most shamelessly lurid elements of 1995’s Se7en) by it’s as engrossing as his best work. Even after two-and-a-half exhausting hours, I found myself eager to come back and see what Fincher and his cohorts do with the next installment of the trilogy.

It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.