Bestsellers

As almost everyone reading this will already know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who “pulls a geographic” (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She’s aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else’s dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

(A personal note before continuing: I knew Elizabeth Gilbert some years ago, when we worked together at Spin magazine. (She was then married to the man she leaves at the beginning of “Eat, Pray, Love.”) She’s a wonderful writer and an even better human being. There’s no question that I think about her book — and the mediocre Hollywood movie resulting from it — differently than I otherwise might, because I have no doubts about the genuineness and generosity of Liz’s intentions. I’m not surprised that she ended up writing a bestseller, and she’s well suited to handle money and fame. I could speculate about her reactions to the merchandising campaign around “Eat, Pray, Love” — which encompasses clothing, jewelry, tea and candles — but then, many of her readers will have asked themselves the same question.)

At any rate, the secret of Gilbert’s book was not so much in the subject matter or the story but in the execution. Whether you find it captivating or maddening — and the marketplace has clearly voted for the former — it’s an artfully managed literary exercise, a thoughtful work of self-examination that’s designed to encourage the reader’s own. Movies don’t do that well, or at least not the kinds of movies people build around Julia Roberts. Inevitably, director Ryan Murphy’s version of “Eat, Pray, Love” (he also co-wrote the screenplay, with Jennifer Salt) is a shorthand romantic fiction, a pretty but hollowed-out imitation that’s one remove from Gilbert’s commentary on her experience and at least two removes from the experience itself.

Gilbert’s fans may enjoy the lovely locations and the appealing supporting cast — especially James Franco as her New York post-marriage lover and Javier Bardem as the Brazilian dreamboat who sweeps her off her feet in Bali — and Murphy works hard to incorporate snatches of her wry, warm prose without turning the project into an audiobook. But the story of “Eat, Pray, Love” isn’t really about people, places and things (although it has apparently done wonders for Bali’s tourist trade). The pasta dinners, the long sessions of Hindu meditation and the glorious, curtain-fronted Balinese gazebos are meant to be accoutrements that enable a questing consciousness to uproot itself from routine and make a crucial inward journey. That’s tough to convey when you’ve got Julia Roberts drifting around looking lovely and vulnerable in a succession of going-native costumes.

Roberts doesn’t look much like Liz Gilbert — although she has indeed absorbed some of her mannerisms — but after all she gets paid to look like Julia Roberts. She gives a nice performance here, ranging from brassy to vulnerable to drunkenly flirtatious. It isn’t her fault that the script tries to jam a memoir into the romantic-comedy template, spiced liberally with New Age nostrums, and can’t quite get it right.

Non-devotees of the book are likely to find Murphy’s “Eat, Pray, Love” an emotionally murky, inflated Lifetime Channel movie, alternately charming, cloying and dull. At 140 minutes, it’s much too long to tell a compact story, but not nearly long enough to explain itself adequately. Stephen (Billy Crudup), the suburban husband Gilbert ditches, appears in several scenes but is more like a personality-free ghost than a character; marrying him and leaving him seem like equally mysterious decisions, since he doesn’t exist. Her ensuing relationship with David (Franco), the underemployed, guru-devoted actor, appears to go instantaneously from hot late-night hookup to shacking up to angry, sexless unhappiness.

Murphy and Salt’s screenplay skips over logistical realities that Gilbert herself never conceals: She was a highly-paid freelance writer who financed her world travel with a substantial publisher’s advance; she had no job to quit because sampling Roman restaurants, Indian meditation centers and Indonesian oceanfront bars pretty much was her job. Gilbert’s first two travel episodes, sampling Italian cuisine and Indian religion, play out as reasonably diverting light comedy, the first frivolous and the second more rueful. Characters come and go quickly — Tuva Novotny as a Swedish gal-pal in Rome, Richard Jenkins as a heartbroken, aphorism-spouting Texan in India — providing Gilbert with teachable moments along the way.

Of course a few scenes in a movie can do almost nothing to explain why Gilbert spent months in an Indian guru’s ashram, or what it is she thinks she found there. And why should it? If the book flirted with the most hackneyed kinds of female escape fantasy, and dared itself to escape that genre, the film has almost nothing else to offer. When we finally get to Bali and rumpled Brazilian divorcé Felipe (Bardem) runs Gilbert’s bike off the road with his jeep, you can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from the filmmakers (and their audience). A lonely guy, a lonely girl, a comic pratfall and an exotic location — from here on in, we’re golden.

It’s not even ironic that one woman’s painful and almost desperate attempt to reconnect with herself and the world became a calculated publishing phenomenon that has spawned a Julia Roberts movie and lines of prayer beads and leather-bound diaries. It’s just the way the world is in an age when the most desirable commodities are private experiences that, at least at first, do not present themselves as commodities at all. (Am I wrong, or is going “off the grid” nearing critical mass as a hot lifestyle trend?) “Eat, Pray, Love” is a minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that’s not a crime. The fact that we find it almost impossible to talk seriously about the pervasive emotional or spiritual or psychological yearning that a story like this represents — that’s a bigger problem.

As anyone who pays attention to Hollywood gossip knows, an English-language adaptation of the Larsson trilogy is purportedly in the works, with David Fincher directing and Daniel Craig playing crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Carey Mulligan of “An Education” may play pint-size feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander — not a great choice, if you ask me — and then again she may not. (Kristen Stewart, who would be terrific, says she definitely, maybe, sort of isn’t interested.) But that project has development-hell problems that go well beyond casting.

Are Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian really going to make one of those ’50s-style movies where the characters all live in a foreign country but speak English? That particular suspension of disbelief works OK if you’re dealing with the distant, mythic past — nobody expects a movie like “300″ to be in ancient Greek, although that would be kind of cool — but otherwise I associate it with cheeseball costume dramas shot in rented Italian villas, or pompous middlebrow movies about how much some dude loves his cello. If they don’t do that, though — if they transfer the setting to, say, Cape Cod or the Napa Valley — well, that screws up the plot in all kinds of ways and you might as well make a different movie.

We’ll let those people sit around in Malibu spending millions of dollars trying to figure that out, and in the meantime we’ve got Alfredson and Frykberg’s lean, mean and workmanlike adaptation, with Spanish-Swedish bombshell Noomi Rapace as ass-kicking, Web-hacking Lisbeth and Michael Nyqvist, who is something like the Scandinavian world’s answer to George Clooney, playing the phlegmatic Blomkvist. They make an appealing yin and yang, around which Larsson’s murky, conspiratorial plot whirls, but one of the problems this middle chapter faces is that they’re kept apart from each other for virtually the entire movie.

Exonerated of the libel charges that sent him to prison in “Dragon Tattoo,” Blomkvist is back at the helm of Millennium, his muckraking magazine, which is about to publish a young journalist’s explosive exposé of a sex-trafficking ring that implicates many of Sweden’s top political, business and law enforcement figures. (At least in Larsson’s vision of 21st-century Sweden, investigative journalism, charmingly enough, still matters.) His ex-lover Lisbeth has vanished from his life without a trace, and Mikael takes up again, in desultory fashion, with Erika (Lena Endre), his more age-appropriate co-worker.

We know, of course, that Lisbeth is back in Stockholm but living under the radar, dropping in occasionally on her ex-girlfriend Miriam (Yasmine Garbi) for a little Sapphic action — and also on the loathsome rapist-lawyer Bjurman (Peter Andersson), with whom she has a little unfinished business. Actually, there’s a whole lot of secrets-from-the-past, “Return of the Jedi”-style unfinished business in this movie, including revelations about what exactly Lisbeth did as a girl that got her locked up and classified as “mentally incompetent.” (Spoiler police: If you want to get mad at somebody, blame Larsson and the filmmakers for giving away a key plot point in the title.)

Anyway, when Blomkvist’s journalistic protégé, the one with the big prostitution scoop, is brutally murdered along with his activist wife, and the gun found in their apartment has Lisbeth’s fingerprints on it, then we’ve got a crackerjack three- or four-way manhunt. Blomkvist searches for Lisbeth, certain that she didn’t do it, and also hunts for the real killers; gloomy Jewish cop Bublanski (Johan Kylén) plods through his investigation, and if he’s less convinced of Lisbeth’s innocence at least he’s not corrupt, unlike every other authority figure in the story. Lisbeth herself, of course, pursues all kinds of people, including the shadowy figures who’ve set her up. At the end of the road lie a notorious Russian gangster and his robotic minion, a big, blond palooka seemingly impervious to pain — but as readers of Larsson’s novels know, I’d better stop there.

As my critical mentor Joe Bob Briggs often used to say, there’s way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, which makes it tough for Alfredson and cinematographer Peter Mokrosinski to focus on the series’ strongest elements. Of course it’s the character of Lisbeth that has made these books and movies into a worldwide phenomenon, and Rapace gets to ride motorbikes, steal cars and do some paramilitary, weapons-based action sequences. But Lisbeth is more a cog in a big, grinding engine in “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which at its best captures both the beautiful but lugubrious Swedish landscape and the existential mood of contemporary northern Europe, trapped between the info-capitalist future and the ideological prisons of the past.

People of Lisbeth’s generation, and even Blomkvist’s, aren’t personally implicated in the crimes of World War II (the specter in “Dragon Tattoo”) or the soulless gamesmanship of the Cold War (referenced here). But even in the Internet age they still have to live in the world those events created, and Larsson’s genius was to suggest a connection between those cruel but supposedly dead ideologies and a continuing legacy of misogyny, rape and violence against women. This sense of history as a living, malevolent presence is largely alien to Americans — William Faulkner aside — and is just one of two or three dozen reasons why the Hollywood version of this story, if it ever gets made, is likely to get it all wrong.

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” opens July 9 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Palm Beach, Fla., Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Washington; July 16 in Baltimore, Charleston, S.C.; Indianapolis, Kansas City, Madison, Wis., Milwaukee, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; and July 23 in Albany, N.Y., Boise, Buffalo, N.Y., Chapel Hill, N.C., Charlotte, N.C., Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Honolulu, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Providence, R.I., Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Ariz., and Columbus, Ohio, with more cities to follow. 

I should say up front that I haven’t read Larsson’s novel, which by some critical standards might disqualify me from reviewing the movie. On the other hand, that’s likely to be the position of most viewers; even when you’re talking about a foreign-language movie and a bestseller in translation, the audience for movies is many times larger than the readership for books. And to drag out the hoariest cliché regarding novel-into-film adaptations, the movie’s always got to stand on its own feet. (For what it’s worth, my colleague Laura Miller likes Oplev’s movie better than the book. “It’s an extremely faithful adaptation that focuses on the central story and characters and loses a lot of extraneous material,” she tells me.)

What I see in Oplev’s film of “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” made from a screenplay by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, is a curious and intermittently compelling hybrid of styles and ingredients. At times it feels like a slick Euro-thriller with a sexy, stylish heroine, somewhat in the mode of French director Luc Besson (“La Femme Nikita”), and indeed it was the highest-grossing European release of 2009. It’s also a serial-killer procedural and a moody neo-noir, whose atmosphere, pacing and photography sometimes suggest the Scandinavian art-film tradition. (At a daunting 152 minutes, “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is longer than all but two of Ingmar Bergman’s films.)

But let’s get back to those competing titles, which suggest some other ways that this story is internally conflicted. Much of the allure of “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” stems from its air of double or even multiple mystery. There are the plot questions: What happened to Harriet Vanger, beloved niece of one of Sweden’s most powerful men, who vanished off a secluded island 40 years ago? Is the Vanger clan’s Nazi-collaborator past somehow linked to a gruesome series of mutilated and murdered women? Then there’s the question of who this story’s real hero is: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a classic hardboiled noir protagonist if ever I’ve seen one, or bisexual bombshell Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the computer hacker with a black leather jacket and a Flock of Seagulls haircut who becomes his stalker, sidekick and lover.

Again, I haven’t read the book, but Oplev’s film struggles to have it both ways, with a diabolical cleverness verging on schizophrenia. It’s a tale of girl-power vengeance and female sexual autonomy, and it’s a story about a rakish middle-aged dude who nails the hottest chick in the world. It’s a story about “men who hate women” that revels in the most ghastly details of their most terrible crimes, and then pays them back in violent catharsis. None of this is new for the thriller genre, to be sure, which revels in the worst things human beings can do to each other, while officially moralizing about them. (Much the same could be said about Greek tragedy or “King Lear,” of course.)

Oplev gets maximum results from his tremendous cast, and while the script supplies little background on either of his main characters — who may be drawn together by the way they’ve internalized old wounds — Nyqvist and Rapace make them seem closer to real people than archetypes. Awaiting a prison term for writing a libelous article about a leading industrialist — yes, that’s a criminal offense in much of the world — Mikael is a handsome, world-weary loner of 40 or so. He’s drawn in by aging Henrik Vanger’s (Sven-Bertil Taube) mournful quest for the truth about his long-lost niece partly by the yearning for a payday and partly because he has nothing to lose, and nothing anchoring him to daily life.

But as Mikael begins to track the long-missing Harriet Vanger, he gradually becomes aware that someone else is tracking him. On probation for a mysterious crime deep in the past (to be revealed in due course), Lisbeth is initially hired by Vanger’s lawyer to dig dirt on Mikael, and then is herself lured in by his investigations. She believes he was set up in the libel case, and while tracking the files and e-mails on his computer, she notices a disturbing pattern behind the Vanger case that Mikael hasn’t detected.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth has her own men-who-hate-women problem: A leering probation officer (Peter Andersson) who first demands blow jobs in exchange for favorable reports, and rapidly escalates to violent sexual abuse. Throughout the film, Oplev tries to walk a fine line, depicting sexual violence — and Lisbeth’s equally violent retribution — with a shocking frankness while striving to stay just this side of outright exploitation. I can totally understand Lisbeth’s appeal for many female readers and viewers; she’s a post-punk update of the “I Spit on Your Grave” rape-revenge fantasy, a merciless dark angel of 21st-century kick-ass feminism.

Rapace, a brooding beauty who won a Swedish Oscar for this performance — and also appears in two more forthcoming installments of this series — invests Lisbeth with a powerful, wounded dignity; she’s much more than a Lara Croft-style cartoon. But there’s no point denying that Lisbeth, as we see her here, is also a male fantasy, albeit one inflected with a contemporary brand of p.c. sexual ideology. When Mikael finds out she’s been stalking him and bursts into Lisbeth’s Stockholm apartment, he finds her in bed with another woman. But said Sapphic companion soon vanishes, and shortly thereafter Lisbeth is shacking up with Mikael on the Vangers’ remote island — platonically, at least until the night when she gets naked and climbs on top of him.

On one hand, there’s nothing to complain about here: Sure, Mikael’s a lot older, but he’s plenty attractive, and Lisbeth’s an adult who gets to make her own decisions. Wasn’t the point of feminism, after all, that a gal gets to pick her own partners for her own reasons? Lisbeth initiates the relationship, and although Mikael clearly falls hard for her, he’s smart enough to grasp that any claims of proprietorship will drive her away fast. As a portrait of a relationship between two individuals, “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is plenty cool. But I can’t help feeling that in so many ways this movie is also an ingenious dodge, a device for getting its boomer hero into bed with a hot young quasi-lesbo biker babe while exclaiming, “Feminism yay! Sexual violence boo!”

However you respond to it, the fraught sexual and investigative chemistry between Mikael and Lisbeth is the most powerful ingredient of “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The movie’s second half is a capably executed but mostly by-the-numbers procedural, as the duo unlocks the Vanger family’s murderous Nazi-related secrets. Cinematographer Eric Kress captures the severe Scandinavian countryside with a dreamlike clarity, and blends various textures — computer images, flashbacks, vintage black-and-white photography — into a compelling weave. I suppose the inevitable American studio version (apparently being scripted by Steven Zaillian for Sony as we speak) will transpose these elements to the Pacific Northwest or coastal Maine, along with — who, exactly? George Clooney as the journalist? Jessica Alba as the wounded avenger? But capturing the atmospheric loneliness of Oplev’s film will be tougher.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” opens March 19 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.