Movie Box Review

HANNA may be the first movie not based on a graphic novel to feel like it is.  Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr (the first film for both) and directed by Joe Wright, it has the feel of a film conceived in visual rather than dramatic terms, more concerned with intensity than depth.  All this catches up with it after a while, but a great deal is redeemed by the superb casting of the main antagonists:  the remarkable young actress Saorise Ronan and the great Cate Blanchett.

The premise is a variation on any number of superhero (and religious) origin stories:  far off in a forest near the Arctic Circle, a father with secrets (Eric Bana) trains his teen daughter Hanna (Ronan) to elude, fight--and kill--anyone who gets in her way.  The time comes when she must leave his sanctuary and join humanity, but she has a mission:  to eliminate the mysterious government agent Marissa (Blanchett) before the woman can do the same to Hanna and her father.   The opening reels of Hanna, in which we follow the girl's training and see Bana's plan play out, are often thrilling:  Wright, making his first action movie, feels in complete control of the material, and Ronan's performance combines youthful innocence with feral violence.  

Things, of course, don't go as planned, and Hanna goes on the run.  This section is in some ways the most interesting, with an almost 1970s movie feel as Hanna learns about the world as she journeys from Northern Africa into Europe, meeting her first "normal" family (Olivia Williams is the mom) and her first friend (Jessica Barden), simultaneously excited by all she's seeing and haunted by the facts of her life.  Of course, Marissa is having Hanna followed, and this chapter climaxes with a chase and shootout among storage containers... which is exciting enough, but also the first sign that Hanna may be running out of inspiration, because if there were a World Action Movie Court, surely one of its first injunctions would be to call a moratorium on confrontations around storage containers and in huge empty factories.

The third act of the story brings us to Germany, and here is where the filmmakers need to unwrap some of the mysteries they've been keeping to themselves, and satisfactorily resolve the story.  This they don't manage to do:  the revelations about Hanna's identity and Marissa's motive to get rid of her are highly predictible, and none of them deepen the characters in any meaningful way.  Instead of dealing with the story on a human scale, Wright gives in to a lust for imagery:  the seeds sown throughout of Hanna being a sort of fairy tale character (her beloved book back in the Arctic was of Grimm's stories) are reaped with a vengeance, as things become borderline surreal with on-the-nose imagery and dialogue.  (One character has to announce a destination by actually saying "To grandmother's house we go.")  Things become increasingly cartoonish, until Blanchett's Marissa is no more than a modern spin on her Nazi in the last Indiana Jones movie, and Hanna has become Hit Girl in Kick-Ass with a less robust vocabulary. 

Which is a shame, because Wright had the actresses on hand to do so much more, and he manages the technical demands of the genre quite impressively.  The striking gray-blue photography by Ben Davis (who's worked often with director Matthew Vaughn, including on Kick-Ass) is notable, and there's an effective score (their first) by The Chemical Brothers.  Hanna is a good genre movie that could have been Christopher Nolan good, an opportunity to leave audiences happy ever after that just slipped through the filmmakers' fingers.

(HANNA - Focus/Universal - 110 min. - PG 13- Director:  Joe Wright - Script:  Seth Lochhead, David Farr - Cast:  Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana - Wide Release)

Saoirse Ronan only appears in the first 50 minutes or so of Joe Wright's film of the Ian McEwan novel ATONEMENT, playing the young Briony Tallis (after that, her character ages into Romola Garai, and then Vanessa Redgrave).  This section, which takes place over the course of a single day in 1935, is the most effective part of the film.   The 13-year old Briony drives the action that will determine the entire story, and Ronan, who had previously appeared in some British TV, captures the mix of pique, profound confusion, half-conscious jealousy, and an intemperate need to form and tell cohesive stories that leads her to unwittingly destroy the lives of those closest to her.  It would have been easy to make Briony a bad seed, spitefully out to hurt people, but--as her adult self comes to realize--the tragedy of her decision is that she talked herself into believing she was telling the truth when accusing the housekeeper's son Robbie (James McAvoy)--also her sister's (Keira Knightley) lover--of a rape he didn't commit.  Ronan was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the performance, which led to her fine work in the misconceived The Lonely Bones and a very strong smaller role in the little-seen The Way Back.  

In the new Hannah, both Wright and Ronan are tackling the action genre for the first time, but the opening part of Atonement makes that seem like less of a reach than you might think.  Wright, who had previously directed Pride and Prejudice, injects the Atonement opening with great energy--Briony is repeatedly seen running through her manor house at such speed that she could be Jack Bauer racing to disarm a terrorist bomb.  Christopher Hampton's script, jumping back and forth in time through that day, creates a thriller atmosphere as we move closer to what we sense will be the terrible consequences of what began as a lovely day, and Dario Marianelli's brilliant score uses the sound of Briony's typewriter as a tense motif. 

The more cinematically colorful second chapter of Atonement, centering on Robbie's attempt to get out of wartime France and ultimately on the Dunkirk evaculation, suggests that Wright still has some limitations as a director.  Partly it's because this is the section of McEwan's book most cut down for the film; all that's left is the sentimentality (which Wright's subsequent The Soloist proved to be his undoing).  And Wright starts showing off, most notably with a 6 minute single shot that pans and tracks throughout Dunkirk and its beachfront without much cause beyond its own virtuosity.  The film recovers somewhat when back in London for the final sections, but doesn't quite manage its attempt to find a cinematic equivalent for the novel's revelation that what we've been reading is itself a work of metafiction, "Briony's" attempt to atone for her long-ago sin.

Atonement was quite successful for an art-house movie, with a worldwide gross of $130M, which followed $121M for Wright's Pride and Prejudice.  However, the more expensive Soloist could only muster $38M worldwide, which may explain why Wright is tackling an action movie.  As classics-minded filmmakers go, Wright brings unusual punch to his projects--neither of his period films has that Merchant/Ivory museum feel--and while Ronan has been in some uneven films, she has yet to give a bad performance.  Hanna has potential to widen the playing field for both of them.