There was a moment, during an early escape sequence, when I half expected Lady Gaga to pop out from behind a concrete bunker. Lights were flashing, troops were trotting, and a young woman was fleeing within their midst: it looked like any number of music videos, and sounded like a music video as well, but for the singing (there wasn’t any).

Hanna works very much like a music video in a more important way: it feeds entirely on its star power. Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, and, most of all, Saoirse Ronan hold the camera in fierce close-ups that help you forget that Hanna doesn’t make a lot of sense. Happily, the screenplay is similarly discreet; the characters do not engage in discussions that would highlight the nightmarish absurdity of the story, which takes a very European view of the CIA (the same mad scientist rap that American filmmakers used to lay on the nation’s Cold War opponents). I say “nightmarish” for a reason: Hanna proceeds like a highly-styled bad dream with interesting episodes and a “happy” ending.

Which is to say that it’s a gripping film, for the most part. Sometimes the episodes take over, and threaten to run away with the main story, while the stylization threatens to render the movie precious in a Sixties sort of way. But you want to know how it comes out — or in any case you want to see Marisa Wergler (Ms Blanchett) get what’s coming to her. Even though you don’t know what she did, or — correction — you know what she did, but you don’t know why.  (Not really.) To my knowledge, she is the first person from Texas ever to be called “Marisa,” and, again, the overlap between wicked East-European Mata Hari and the role that Julia Roberts played in Charlie Wilson’s War provides a certain cognitive-dissonant fizz.

Joe Wright, who directed her in Atonement, is obviously taken with Ms Ronan’s looks — and why not? With Gemma Jones’s trascending gaze, and a fine-boned reserve that seems inherited from Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave, Saoirse Ronan has a beauty to be reckoned with, and her Hanna is gorgeously feral. Long before we learn that, thanks to DNA tampering that the Marisa person would like to keep hush-hush, Hanna is every bit as unusual as she seems to be — she can wrestle Eric Bana, whom she thinks is her father, to the ground — we have given up expecting Ms Ronan to be just another pretty face.

That’s why the movie’s most extended episode, in which Hanna hooks up with an English family caravaning its way from Morocco to Spain and beyond, bogs down: it tells us what we already know, which is that Hanna is not just another teenaged girl. Having spent her entire life on the edge of the Arctic Circle, she has never seen gypsies dance, or worn a tutu, or kissed a boy. This is what Hanna might have been about, making it an entirely different picture, one that would put to better use its fantastic little ensemble of actors cast as the English bobos, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng, Aldo Maland, and the deliciously jaded Jessica Barden. But since this is a thriller, we can’t get into the class struggle that the parents wage while bringing up their children as free spirits; we’re just annoyed with them for being unaware of the danger that they’re in. We fret for their safety every moment that Hanna spends with them, uneasily convinced that they will not escape the twisted attentions of Marisa’s hit man, Isaacs (Tom Hollander,) and his minions. That we are spared their untimely demise is not something that we can feel quite grateful for; it’s almost worse that they’re dropped into limbo.

Another episode — and more of this might have strengthened the movie’s thriller spine — takes place at an abandoned theme park devoted to the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  This relic of the DDR makes an appealing ruin, and Joe Wright makes the most of its ironies. (The one souvenir that Hanna has of her mother is a book of the fairy tales, told mostly in drawings.) But I came away thinking that what this episode needed was not an artiste like Wright but a Hollywood hack who would not let interesting cinematography get in the way of heartstopping action. As it is, the episode (which is also climactic) feels both confused and truncated.

Perhaps the theme park offers a clue: what Hanna really is is a fairy tale. What’s riveting about the movie is the archetypal antagonism between Hanna and Marisa, which blazes through the film even though it is only at the end that the wicked stepmother and the innocent angel come together. This is a duel that we know very well, and from one of the best-known Grimm tales, that of Snow White. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.