Ronan looking suitably shell-shocked in Hanna |
Little
killer girl
Hanna,
Joe Wright's first attempt to direct an original screenplay as
opposed to a literary adaptation, is fun in a lowbrow way, easily his
most enjoyable work yet. It's silly from the get-go and not as smart
as it thinks; the fight sequences range wildly in quality, from
incomprehensible to derivative. But the imagery is vivid, and the
performances compelling and memorable.
The
basic premise goes like this: Erik Heller (Eric Bana) trains his
daughter Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) to be a remorseless, relentless killer
in the icy reaches of Finland. The girl is hunted by intelligence
officer Marissa Wegler (Cate Blanchett), who's trying to clean up the
mess left behind by an old CIA program involving unwanted fetuses and
genetic manipulation.
The
story so far seems like the kind of fantasy scenario dreamed up by
ambitious young college students while still in film school--and in
fact is the product of a film school graduate, one Seth Lochhead
(with additional polish provided by TV writer and playwright David
Farr). What brings the movie down to Earth and in the realm of human
emotions is what happens when Hanna escapes--she falls in with a
hippie-ish family out on a camping vacation, and makes friends with
their daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden). Life with Sophie and her
parents affords Hanna her own fantasy, that of living a normal life,
with normal friends--even a potential boyfriend, without the
prospect of snapping his neck.
Ronan
plays Hanna like a robot or android with its human infiltration
software imperfectly installed--but instead of crippling her
performance, this not-all-there quality only intensifies it, makes it
mysterious and (hence) fascinating. The girl has a pale wintery
beauty that befits the Finnish snowscape; when taken on the camping
trip she's hilariously out of place--an ethereal fairy lacking only a
pair of wings to fly off and sprinkle pixie dust all over everyone.
As
her father Eric Bana does creditably well--a mix of training coach
and father, with all the accompanying baggage of patriarchal guilt and
pride (it doesn't hurt that he's in perfect physical condition to
kick ass). As CIA Officer Wegler Cate Blanchett easily steals the
show; she lays her Texan accent about her like a cudgel, and fires
laser glares at her opponents from her brilliant blue eyes (she's
more than a match for Ronan, gazewise). She gives the movie the campy
charge it badly needs, and indicates a potential direction the
picture sadly refuses to take--the whole thing could have been more
persuasive, sold as a more explicitly comic romp.
Director
Wright isn't one to inspire admiration--his 2005 adaptation of Pride
and Prejudice was widely and highly regarded, though I much prefer
either Colin Firth or Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle
or Greer Garson as Liz Bennet anytime (Kiera Knightly as Wright's Liz
was too, I don't know, contemporary-looking; too bony; too slight in
terms of talent and charisma to really count). I thought his 2007
adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement was a beautifully staged
misfire, with a wretchedly edited crucial love scene near its
beginning (again featuring the perennially miscast Miss Knightly), a
pretentiously overextended post-battlefield tracking shot near its
middle, and a finale (narrated by the great Vanessa Redgrave) that
practically begs you to shed tears (and I would, for wasting Redgrave
in this). I had my suspicions with Pride, but Atonement that pretty much confirmed it for me--Wright doesn't
really know what he was doing.
With
the kind of premise the movie has--killer girl chased by intelligence
agency--you'd think the action sequences would be crucial, and you'd
be right. Wright, unfortunately, only gets it partly right--he tends to shoot far too close in for us to see what's going
on clearly, and doesn't seem to know how to use the judicially
applied cut to create mounting tension. That said, a fight scene
where Erik fends off four attackers in a single, constantly
re-framing long take is impressive, the best single action sequence in the picture, until you realize Wright is
cribbing from Park-Chan Wook's far more impressively staged and shot Oldboy.
It's
a mixed bag, really--a pair of beautiful killers confronting each
other; a chase over Finnish snowscapes, Moroccan deserts and an
abandoned amusement park (a location that manages to be both
evocative and pretentious); a director only half in control over his
material, a script written back in film school. It makes
you long for the equally pretentious but far more entertaining visual
stylings of Luc Besson, who at least know how to cut, and use slow
motion, and the like--a man Terence Rafferty once
described as “The end of French cinema as we know it.” Wright
doesn't represent the end of anything, though you wonder why he keeps
bothering. For the record he's doing another adaptation, his most
ambitious yet, of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--this some fourteen
years after Bernard Rose's version (critically lambasted, though in my book an underrated gem), with
gorgeous Sophie Marceau as Anna. Rose is at least twice the
filmmaker Wright is; why oh why does the man even bother?
First published in Businessworld, 9.29.11
2 comments:
Ive seen this movie way back in april, how come it took so long to b released here? Oh by the way
Saoirse Ronan kicks ASS!!!!
I dunno. Apparently they thought it wouldn't make money.
I agree. So does Blanchett, I think.
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