Bad Girls’ Revenge

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Directed by Niels Arden Oplev Runtime: 152 min.

The Runaways Directed by Floria Sigismondi Runtime: 109 min.

Can we please have a moratorium on serial killer, Holocaust and child-abuse combos? Too soon after Shutter Island, the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo arrives with its preposterous plot combining all those elements. The result: a nearly three-episode-length film of TV’s Cold Case, featuring a punk-goth, fish-out-of-water heroine Lisabeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). She’s a computer whiz who helps a journalist investigate a financial crime that sprang from unsolved murders of teenage girls beginning four decades ago.

This gross entertainment centers on female brutalization and that 21st-century delectation: revenge. Lisabeth gets back at the men whose abuse put her into a juvenile prison, turned her into a lesbian outsider with numerous body piercings, plus leather, fishnets, a Posh Spice Pageboy hairdo and the titular tattoo across her back and thighs. Lisabeth looks like a dominatrix Juno in the scenes where she scams the Stuart Smalley-type probate officer who had extorted and raped her. This revenge ain’t sweet, it’s just the start of director Niels Arden Oplev’s sadomasochist follies.

These cheap thrills use gender politics and national trauma (hidden Nazi family business) as justification—including a subplot attacking the moral edicts of the Book of Leviticus. Yet, Oplev’s true estimate of Lisabeth shows when her final self-actualization resembles a high-priced hooker.

Thankfully, the pseudo-progressive, anti-patriarchy porn of Dragon Tattoo is exposed by the raucous, casual feminist intelligence of The Runaways. Just by telling rock ‘n’ roll history, music video director Floria Sigismondi’s debut feature describes how girls are circumscribed by our culture’s sexist expectations. These 1970s California teens couldn’t run away from the requirement to cater to the mean labor, debilitating vices and masculine taste (including pop music) that oppressed them. That only makes their childish, snarling rage (grinding guitars, artillery drums and impudent vocals) all the more sympathetic, funny and exhilarating.

Sigismondi’s script captures the mixed-motives of songs like the ingenious “Cherry Bomb,” flirting with delinquency and culture shock. (A montage of the group’s formation is underscored by Johnny Rotten’s inimitable sneer: “We’re all pretty, oh so pretty va-cunt!”) Lisabeth’s contrived, tattooed toughness isn’t nearly so affecting as the trailer-park female passion in The Runaways’ portrait of escape that was as brief as adolescence. For a moment, showbiz-jailbait girls got to use boys as toys while practicing sisterly and queer solidarity.

Critic Benjamin Strong already pointed out the film’s resemblance to Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine. But Sigismondi surpasses Haynes’ over-educated exploitation of ’70s rock by focusing on authentic American working-class frustration, not glamour. Todd Graff’s wonderful, little-seen Bandslam offered similar insight. It also had a breakout performance moment by Vanessa Hudgens that The Runaways lacks. Well-cast Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie both look right, yet are too recessive. Sigismondi lets Michael Shannon overplay Svengali producer Kim Fowley like Gerrit Graham’s Beef in Phantom of the Paradise; his androgyny is fascinating, and his lines are good (“Fuck authority, I want an orgasm!”), but there’s a sour taste of revenge as he’s eventually vilified. The Runaways loses momentum when it turns into revenge rock. Can we please have a moratorium on movie revenge?