THE CAPTOR: THE ORIGINAL STOCKHOLM SYNDROME ON FILM

NOTE: This review contains some small spoilers

In August of 1973 a Swede called Jan-Erik Olsson, having skipped out on his temporary release from prison, stepped into a bank in Stockholm's Normalmstorg,originally pretending to be American, and, armed with a sub-machine gun, took four people (three women, one man) hostage. He demanded money, a getaway Ford Mustang, and the release of his former cell-mate, Clark Olofsson. The hostage crisis lasted six days, most of which the captors and hostages spent in a bank vault: the authorities had given Olsson what he wanted, but refused to allow him and Olofsson to take the hostages with them when they left. Finally, when the captors surrendered, the hostages protected them as they left the vault together, they refused to testify against them, and seemed to have identified with them, if not been seduced by them. This phenomenon stunned the Swedish authorities. A Swedish psychologist coined it Normalmstorg Syndrome, which the rest of the world now calls Stockholm Syndrome.

I paid particular attention to the story at the time because I had just returned to America from my first visit to Europe, much of which time had been spent meeting my relatives in Sweden. I noted at the time that Olofsson was kept in Kalmar Prison, which is just across the Olandsbron from where many of my family lived and I remember wondering then and wondered now exactly how they got him up to Stockholm so quickly.

Canadian writer/director Robert Budreau went back to a contemporary account in The New Yorker as the basis for his screenplay, and his version, originally called Stockholm when it premiered at Tribeca last year, but was retitled The Captor (neither title is great, to be honest), is a slimmed down version of a story which plays somewhere between farce and thriller, comedy and tragedy. It recalls Dog Day Afternoon, another film based on a real 'robbery' which took place a year before the Normalmstorg one, where the real purpose of the robbery wasn't simply to rob a bank. There's that sense of the robbers being in over their head, that the emotions behind their action overpowers the logic of the situation, and this is what Budreau works on to 'explain' as it were, the nature of Stockholm Syndrome.

In The Captor, it's less a collective feeling born of a long stay in a confined place under horrible conditions, and more of two individual love stories. The obvious one is between Olsson, here called Lars Nystrom (all the names were changed as many of the people involved are still alive) and played by Ethan Hawke and one of the hostages, here called Bianca and played by Noomi Rapace. The story puts Lars in contrast to Bianca's boring husband, and it's not too subtly shown that Lars' plan to shoot her, while she wears a bullet-proof vest, is a sort of climax, as it were, of their growing attraction. But there is also the relationship of Lars and his partner, here called Gunnar and played by Mark Strong. It's a strong enough bond that the police chief accuses Lars of being 'queer' and Bianca later asks him if he 'loves' Gunnar.

This focus renders the other two hostages almost superfluous, which is a shame because Bea Santos as Klara in particular tries to convey feelings about what is going on, without much scope for that. We wind up seeing the bonding between the five (the number of captives has been reduced from the actual four captives) which comes about primarily because they come to believe that the kidnappers care more about their safety than either the police or the politicians, who have bigger points to make with them as the pawns. The key scene is a phone call between Bianca and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who chilly detachment contrasts sharply with Lars' undirected passion.

What saves this conflict of themes, between a love story and a syndrome story, from sinking the film is the quality of the acting. Once you realise Hawke is playing a Swede playing an American playing a Swede, it all makes sense, and he does a tremendous job of bringing out Lars child-like energy and lack of judgement. Rapace is brilliant, able to convey building emotion and internal conflict with small looks behind the oversized glasses which were the fashion in Sweden in those days. Strong has to be the straight man for Hawke, but he carries off an ambiguous position well (he had been offered his freedom if he 'mediated' a solution--eventually Swedish courts found Olofsson not guilty and he was released from prison). There is also a star turn by Canadian actor Christopher Heyerdahl (cousin of the Norwegian explorer) as police chief Mattsson. He plays a role which is sometimes even farcical and sometimes brutal with a precise control that reminded me constantly of Max Von Sydow, who would have been cast in that role had a Swedish version been made at the time, a la Dog Day Afternoon. His performance is the real anchor against which the chaos of the hostage situation plays.

In the end, of course, the captors were captured and the captives protected them so the police could not hurt them. Olofsson and his family later became friendly with Kristin Enmark (the 'Bianca' hostage who talked with Palme) and he went back to a life of crime. Janne Olsson married one of the many women who corresponded with him while he served his prison sentence, also returned to crime after his release, but when he decided to surrender to Swedish authorities discovered he was not wanted for anything. He and his family eventually settled in Thailand.

The film ends cutting between Bianca with her family on the beach, as if longing for something else, and a scene of her visiting Lars in prison, and with him in one of the rooms reserved for conjugal visits. The room has been referenced earlier in the film, but here their distance and silence suggests the longing is not for Lars at all, and one recalls her asking if Lars loves Gunnar. Hawke's character seems as confused about life as he was about bank robbing and hostage taking.

The Captor (aka Stockholm) is on release today

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk) 

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: THE DROP

The Drop tells the story of Bob Saginowski, a quiet bartender at Cousin Marv's, whose owner, Marv, actually is his cousin. But Marv isn't really the owner; the bar belongs to Chechen gangsters, and they use it as a drop, where the money collected from their night's activities is dropped off. They have lots of drop bars; the collection moves around. Bob's life is about to change, when two things happen. Walking home one night he rescues a battered dog from a garbage can; he's forced to adopt the dog and he also meets Nadia, who helps him cope with that. It changes again when two guys in masks rob Cousin Marv's. It wasn't a drop night, but the five grand lost still belongs to the Chechens; they want it back and they want the robbers gone. Bob's quiet but he knows things. 

The movie opens in the bar, with Bob buying a round for a group of friends remembering Richie 'Glory Days' Phelan, a small-time drug dealer who disappeared ten years before, after leaving Cousin Marv's. Marv doesn't like that Bob sprang for the round; it tells you a lot about the two, almost but not quite all you need to know.

Bob is a showcase role for Tom Hardy, the British actor who's got to adapt to Brooklynese (usually difficult, British actors tend to switch from Brooklyn to the Bronx to Alabama in the same sentence) and Hardy handles it well. When I reviewed Dennis Lehane's novel, an expansion of his original short story I said Hardy would have to underplay the role significantly (you can link to that here) and he does just that. In fact, at times his performance recalls Tim Robbins' in Mystic River, doing the slow retard shuffle for all it's worth. Mystic River, of course, was another Lehane story, and like Dave in that story, Bob may have simply seen too much.

The setting of The Drop has been changed, from Lehane's Boston to Brooklyn. Cousin Marv's bar is now decorated with a New York Giants football helmet lamp, and the patrons sport Giants and Jets jackets instead of Patriots or Red Sox. I suppose Brooklyn is hipper than Boston, but the film is resolutely unhip, set in the same kind of working class neighbourhood as Mystic River's Southie, full of dead ends and alleys, which Belgian director Michael Roskam seems to relish.

Because of the dog, and Nadia, Eric Deeds enters Bob's world. The dog was his, and if Bob wants now to keep it, there will be a price to pay. Deeds is a borderline psycho who is rumoured to have killed 'Glory Days'. And Bob has provided the police (and thus the Chechens) with a small piece of identification about the bank robbers: one wore a watch stopped at 6:15. From these roots the story proceeds slowly, but almost relentlessly. You have to pay attention to small bits of dialogue, to small actions, to keep up with it fully; there are hints dropped along the way which pay off as the story is resolved, but more important, there are echoes: characters who mirror each other, events that reverberate in time, and a feel of tragic inevitability to almost everything that happens.

It's the Eric Deeds character who's most problematic. Matthias Schoenarts, as if taking a cue from Hardy, underplays his character too, but sometimes the sense of real menace in Deeds is lacking. What the film does, subtly and quickly, is establish the way in which Deeds and Bob are yin and yang, contrasting sides of a coin. I don't want to review the film by comparison to the story and book, but in the novel Deeds is given a lot of background, establishing his own victimisation in prison, his own violence, and his self-help list of things to remember, a perverse sort of Dale Carnegie prescriptions to influence people, if not win friends. Also lost is the backstory for Detective Torres, which is not so essential, and, sadly, the wonderful speech about life which Chovko, the Chechen gangster, makes when Bob pours him a Midleton Irish. Only the punch line remains.

The original story was called 'Animal Rescue', and that's what the whole story is about. There are people who need rescuing throughout the film, and some get rescued, while others don't. That the local church, which Bob has attended regularly for ten years without taking communion, is being sold off for redevelopment simply echoes that theme. Hardy's hang-dog expression makes this theme of rescue clear, and Noomi Rapace is very good at playing another damaged person in need of rescue herself even as she throws a lifeline out to Bob. Picking up a small statue of angel with one wing at Bob's kitchen table she asks, 'do you want me to fix it?'

But the hidden center of the film is James Gandolfini, in his final role, as Marv. Once a player, if only on a small scale, he's now living with his sister (the excellent Ann Dowd), both of them hanging on to dreams but barely getting by. After the film one critic told me it was sad to see Gandolfini playing Tony Soprano yet again in his final role, but nothing could be further from the truth. He inhabits Marv, and his TV role never enters into it. It's a fine performance that works in perfect contrast to Hardy's restraint, exactly the way the characters should be, and it's that concentration on the contrast that makes The Drop work so well.

NOTE: This review also appeared at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest on film suffers from many of the same problems it did as a novel: a need to bring so many plot strands and so much historical background together it sometimes flounders on its own exposition. Of course it's far easier to do in the book, because you have the time, and in reducing the book to a flowing thriller, particularly one in which the main character is hospital bed-ridden for much of time, the film-makers have had to lose a lot. In fact, they appear to take as given that their audience has either read the trilogy or at least seen the previous film, The Girl Who Played With Fire, which was made by the same team and basically appears to have been conceived as one long mini-series, re-edited into two feature films.

I said as much when I reviewed Girl Who Played (link to that here) back in August, after reviewing it for The Strand, that it appeared to be scaled for the smaller screen, and I think viewing the sequel confirms that. The first film, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, was conceived by the different team of film-makers as a much more a self-contained story, with the thriller plot foregrounded and much of the rest left behind, but in those terms it worked, and the second-third films of the trilogy may be considered almost as stand-alone.

The biggest cut, of course, is the background into the secret intelligence group that ran Lisbeth Salander's father and others and initated its own political policies within the Swedish government. Larsson approached issues which resonate in Swedish political history, but which aren't really relevant to the basic Salander plot, so out they go in this film. I have commented many times on the similarity of Larsson's trilogy to The Count Of Monte Cristo, and it's here that the comparison is most clear--like Edmond Dantes, Lisbeth is imprisoned for knowledge which is is unaware she has, to protect people she doesn't know she threatens. That Mikke Blomqvist becomes her Abbe puts a slightly different twist on their relationship.

Of course much else is lost--if you hadn't seen the second film you would not even have caught the reference to Erika Berger's being married, which would explain why the spies might think photographs of her and Mikke were compromising. The subplot with her being offered a newspaper editor's job disappeared, instead Lena Endre is left yet again playing the authority figure who acts as a brake or rein on a more committed professional. That she's somewhat too old for the role makes her more of a mother-figure and less a sometimes-romantic partner, but she is so good an actress she carries it off.

Yet another of the novels' unlikely romances for Mikke is left behind, and the story doesn't suffer for that, and again there are only cameo appearances for the cop Bublanski, one of the novel's more interesting characters, and for Armanskij, whose security skills figure heavily on the page. There are so many characters within the intelligence, legal, and police world's that it is hard to keep track of just exactly who is who, and what they did, which is also a problem which having read the book helps solve.

Much of Salander's internet activity from her hospital bed is condensed, which is not a huge loss, but what is underplayed the most is the courtroom. Lisbeth's appearance, back in full punk regalia, is a nice set-piece, but the whole dynamic of the court, complete with a mystifying performance by the chief judge, who keeps nodding and making faces which are supposed to indicate either agreement or disagreement. Of course, given the Swedish justice system's behaviour in the current Assange case, it's not surprising they seem to bend over for the prosecution until they can't. Still, the condensing of the case for the screen loses much of the nuance, and what is lft in the trial is both obvious from a plot summary and questionable from a legal procedural one! The courtroom is central to Larsson's story, however--as you can see from the Swedish film poster--the idea that 'castles in the air' that Lisbeth blows up are the ideal of Swedish society, which only a few committed people (Mikke, Lisbeth's doctor, and some others) actually believe in. Much of Larsson's success stems from the resonance of that residual disappointment in many modern democracies.

But the lone hero triumphing is something of a Dumas cliche, if not one from films. In films, of course, you need yet another small car chase is squeezed into the story, complete with baby-carriage being threatened, but yet again Larsson triumph because of the Salander character, and Noomi Rapace steals the show at the end, with her simple inability to express her thanks in person. This film, and its predecessor, give you the skeleton frames of the novels, much of the fascinating background, and make the best characters play out as they do on the page. It works for what it is, and it would be very hard to expect it to be more--I think of Rosi or Oliver Stone as filmmakers who have approached deep conspiracies successfully in more depth, and I've wondered about historical shorthand turning into longhand in The Baader-Meinhof Gang or Carlos, but I'd be curious to see how this would edit into a mini-series.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

On Tuesday's BBC World Service programme The Strand, I discussed The Girl Who Played With Fire, which was released in Britain yesterday. You can hear that on BBC I Player here, for a couple of more days, it's the lead item in the running order. Here's a fuller take on the film:

The second Swedish film adapted from Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels is very different from the first, a more complicated yet less layered movie, with a number of impressive set-pieces and an even more impressive performance by Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander. More complicated but less layered may sound an oxymoron, so let me explain.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was scripted by a pair of extremely talented Danish feature film makers, Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, and directed by another Dane, Niels Arden Oplev. They trimmed down the book considerably, particularly cutting back on Mikke Blomqvist's romances, to focus on his relationship with Lisbeth Salander. This had the effect of simplifying the story, making it more of a thriller, but it worked and kept a huge book manageable on film. When I saw the preview of that film, John Landis was sitting by me, and afterwards he exclaimed 'it's like an episode of Columbo', which says as much about his sensitivity to nuance as to plot arc, but in a way he was right. Take away the stuff about Swedish society, Nazi connections, abuse of women, and serial killers and it is more like a Columbo plot, though it was made so well, shot so subtly, it was hard to make the connection visually.

But The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second installment of the trilogy, allows that sort of connection to be made more easily. The films are being shot with Swedish and German television in mind, and this one was made by a director (Daniel Alfredsson) who, though he has made features, was also head of drama at SVT as well as a proflific and good television director, and scripted by Jonas Frykberg, whose career has mainly been in TV. This is not a question of quality as much as scale; this film seems scaled far more for the small screen than the first one. On The Strand I used the example of advocat Bjurman's summer house, where he has hidden Salander's files. Both times we see it, although the viewer should know what it is, Alfredsson makes sure to pull back to show the mailbox at the entrance to the driveway, the kind of establishing shorthand we expect on TV.

But the real difference between the two films is in the scripting, because this one remains very faithful to the novel, which has good and bad points. The bad is that, as with the first volume, the book is very densely plotted, and its characters are given lots of back story and time to develop. The result is that a number of times in this film, the characters have to explain things to each other, that is, to us, the audience. Certain interesting characters, like the detective Bublanski, or Salander's old boss Armanskij, don't get a chance to be developed here, while others, like Blomkvist's sister, are introduced with no explanation (we see her Italian in-laws, but don't learn she's a leading criminal lawyer--that presumably has been left for the third installment). There is also more romance in this one, we not only get a somewhat gratuitous but otherwise rewarding lesbian love scene with Rapace and Yasmin Garbi, but we see Blomkvist's relationship with his editor, Erika, not only when they are in bed but when he tells his in-laws he's in love with a married woman. That the excellent Lena Endre gets more space as Erika is another positive, though her role seems to be much like hers in the Swedish Wallander series, to act as a brake on the main male character. Interestingly, both she and Michael Nykvist are a bit older than the book's characters; Nykvist's Blomkvist is played with belly extended to make the point he's not a natural ladies' man.

There is also space for Per Oscarsson to deliver a fine performance as the stroke-ridden Palmgren, Salander's original guardian, and Peter Andersson is suitably slimy as Bjurman. Paolo Roberto, playing himself, is quite good, though I'm not sure we actually needed a car chase, except to re-establish this as a TV movie, but the difficulty with the character of Niederman, with his inability to feel pain, makes it difficult, and Micke Spreitz with his dyed hair reminded me of Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love (which, interestingly, is also the title of Mia's book about the imported sex trade), if not Ivan Drago from Rocky whatever number it was.

It is also odd how small anomalies stand out in the continuity. I didn't go back to the book to check, but did Miriam Wu really carry Salander's birthday present around in her purse for a full
year on the off-chance she might show up again? When Salander beats up the two motorcycle gang guys, and rides off on one of their bikes, where did she find a helmet that fits her? Neither biker wore one, nor were they carrying one (though I seem to recall in the book they might have been for a girlfriend). And a plot revolving around a key dropped by a woman who makes few mistakes of panic does stretch things a bit.

Those who have read the books will find this film touches all the bases. For those who haven't, it may be a bit hard to follow, but many of them will be presumed to have seen the first installment, which would make things a bit easier. But the selling point of this second film is Noomi Rapace. The scene where she dons face paint to frighten the journalist who's been linked to the sex trade is a bravura set-piece for her, and, much as the first film was Blomkvist's, with Salander coming to the rescue, this one is hers, with Blomkvist doing the same. That they play only one scene together makes that point even clearer.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is very good television, and it's an entertaining film, if not as impressive as its predecessor. And though Rooney Mara may come from American football royalty (her father's family owns the New York Giants and her mother's the Pittsburgh Steelers) she will have her work cut out trying to match Noomi Rapace's performance. I'll suggest my take on what the American version may be like sometime in the future (hint: Daniel Craig doesn't write for a small left-wing magazine, but for the Wall Street Journal).