Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/10/11
Indie,
artsy, Sundancy, whatever you want to call it, there’s a kind of tone we
all recognize as the opposite of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.
Under the right circumstances, this quirky, morose, navel-gazing style
can be interesting (think the good parts of the Wes Anderson catalogue),
under others it can be maddeningly irksome (think the bad parts of the
Wes Anderson catalogue). But I’m hard-pressed to think of a director
who can convincingly summon the Sundance Tone at will and then turn it
off when he doesn’t feel like it. So, to see Hanna, an elliptical
action thriller that’s been stalking those Black List “best unproduced
scripts” lists for a few years, helmed by the very conventional Joe Wright
(whose Atonement was absolutely bonkers narratively
but still managed to be utterly, properly English) and yet swing so wildly
for the film festival crowd is, well, weird. And not in a good way.
Kept afloat to a point by yet another commanding performance by Atonement’s
breakout Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, Hanna tests our patience with
one bit of time-killing quirkiness after another until there simply turns
out to be no “there” there.
Hanna
(Saoirse Ronan) is a young girl whose world consists of hunting, reading
and lessons in deadly combat from her “father” Erik (Eric Bana).
She grows weary of this and yearns to see the outside world, but he makes
it clear that this can only happen in one way: she must throw a switch
that will alert Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett) to her presence.
Weigler sends in the troops, captures Hanna as Erik flees, and wisely sends
a double to meet her. The girl murders the fake Marissa and escapes.
Weigler’s been keeping a secret only she and Erik know, and she’s determined
to kill him, so she hires the ruthless Isaacs (Tom Hollander) to do what
she can’t and capture Hanna, who’s fallen in with an odd English family
on vacation in Morocco. This, of course, is the kind of story that
can’t end until only one person is left alive.
The
key words in any description of Hanna are “self-conscious”.
A little transgressive kiddie lesbianism here, a creepy German fairy tale-themed
amusement park there, and every single character speaking in an over-the-top
accent they haven’t quite mastered, and none of it feels like the right
way to tell this story. Of course, the script is also absurdly coy,
and in the end you only know about 40% of what you need to understand exactly
what it was that Marissa was so determined to keep a secret in the first
place.
Ronan’s
got star power to burn and excels in these sort of “mature beyond her years”
roles. Hanna is both lethally brilliant and utterly naïve,
pity the movie never gets around to having her learn anything about how
real people (as opposed to characters in an indie movie) live. Blanchett
belongs in a fairy tale herself, being a wicked witch indeed, but that
crazy Southern-fried accent makes it hard to connect to her as a character.
Bana just drowns under a terrible German accent, although his physicality
in the role is solid. Hollander’s homicidal club owner is a badly
conceived character he does no favors. The only actor in the supporting
cast who manages to approximate humanity is Olivia Williams, who’s a breath
of fresh air as a modern day flower child that couldn’t be more different
than her usual ruthless women of power.
As
the ad campaign prominently informs us, a score by The Chemical Brothers
may be the movie’s highlight (the track that underscores the trailer is
called “Container Park” and belongs on everybody’s MP3 player), managing
to make a few of Wright’s coldly precise action sequences come to life.
But Hanna is ultimately a chilly stylistic exercise in conflicting
elements (indie quirk in a ruthless action movie, great actors doing horrible
accents, a puzzle box thriller with no answers). Can’t say the kicky
trailer didn’t warn me it would be quirky, just not that it would be bad. |
