Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett
Directed By: Joe Wright
Written By: David Farr and Seth Lochhead
Story By: Seth Lochhead
Produced By: Leslie Holleran, Marty Adelstein and Scott Nemes
Distributor: Focus Features
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 111 minutes
Website: hannathemovie.com
Budget: $30 million
Genre: Action
Release Date: April 8, 2011
There’s a running theme of fairy tales throughout Hanna, the latest from Atonement director Joe Wright. There are good guys and bad guys, witches and runaways, wolves and a Little Red Riding Hood. The problem is that these roles switch throughout the movie, and sometimes Red Riding Hood is every bit as vicious as the wolf.
The most indelible image we see of Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), high-ranking CIA operative, is of her meticulous caring for her tooth. These are fangs, with the blood to prove it, and Wiegler has specific prey in mind. Fifteen years after disappearing from the grid, wayward agent Erik Heller (Eric Bana, of Munich and Hulk) has turned up again, tracked to a remote forest in the Arctic circle. Wiegler doesn’t know what she’ll find when she sends her agents to retrieve him, but she knows getting to Heller means getting rid of the last loose end of a botched CIA operation all those years ago.
She should be afraid. Heller has spent all those years raising his daughter, the title character, played by Atonement and The Lovely Bones’ Saoirse Ronan, in complete isolation. Heller’s spent the last 15 years, completely cut off from civilization and modern concepts like electricity and even music, training Hanna to do one thing: kill the person who killed her mother. Kill Marissa Wiegler.
Of course, it’s not as simple as all that, as Hanna and Heller draw Marissa out and their plan begins to unfold. Known more for lush period dramas – his first film was an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice – Wright seems like an odd fit for a thriller like Hanna, a movie predicated on heavy outbursts of violence and brutal retribution. The outbursts, however, are just that, punctuation to the drama, and that’s where Hanna has more in common with Wright’s other efforts.
Masquerading (and sold to audiences) as revenge thriller, Hanna is actually a surprisingly cerebral, contemplative character study… about a 16-year-old girl that can snap your spine with her bare hands. It’s an art film with action movie trappings, a drama dressed in a revenge thriller’s clothes. In not necessarily lesser, but different, hands – the Zack Snyders, the Michael Bays of the film world – the premise would have been purely provocative, solely an exercise in vapid action posturing and gimmick filmmaking. In Wright’s hands, though, Hanna is handled with a shocking amount of subtlety and sensitivity.
Yes, Ronan’s Hanna kicks a surprising amount of ass – pity the clueless CIA agents sent to retrieve this slip of a girl – but the violence of the movie is balanced with Hanna’s confusion and joy at, for the first time, being out in a world she’s yearned for but doesn’t understand. The movie’s best moments come from Hanna who, traveling across Europe for a planned rendezvous with Heller in Berlin, is allowed to indulge in a “normal” teenage life, eating food she hasn’t hunted and killed herself and wondering if she should be kissing boys or treating them as potential threats (follow those instincts, kid). Most action movies pay some lip service to an emotional life for their characters, and in this case it doesn’t feel like an afterthought: Hanna is a character. Traumatized, flawed, and in line for many, many years of therapy, but a three-dimensional character just the same.
Wright coaxes a nice, heavily internalized performance from Ronan, his Atonement star. They’re helped by the script by David Farr and Seth Lochhead, which isn’t afraid to embrace some stock genre situations – Wiegler’s team of sadistic Eurotrash thugs wouldn’t be out of place as henchmen in a Bond movie – but place the emphasis squarely on Hanna as she tries to make sense of a world she’s never been a part of before. Hanna’s cat-and-mouse with Wiegler crosses continents and most of the movie’s running time, but in the end, you’re either Red Riding Hood or you’re the wolf. Bet on the little blonde girl with the gun.
3 Stars
