Thursday, September 10, 2015

Hanna (2011, PG-13)

This is a neat movie.  It has a lot of what the trailer promised, Saoirse Ronan being a badass teenage assassin, but also more pathos than I expected, digging into the psyche of a girl who’s been made a weapon.  Though it has its issues, it’s finely made, and I enjoyed it immensely.

All her life, Hanna has been in training.  Living off the grid with her ex-CIA dad, she’s been taught to hunt, fight, and kill with her hands, feet, and any number of weapons.  She’s fluent in multiple languages, and she knows, variously, how to disappear in a crowd, escape through a ventilation shaft, and survive in the wilderness.  But training is meant to build to something, and they can’t continue as they are forever.  When Hanna decides she’s ready, she begins her first real assignment – taking on the intelligence operative who’s been searching for her dad since they went below the radar.  She sets about her task with ruthless efficiency.  Real-world operations, however, aren’t like training, because Hanna has seen so little of the real world.  She’s never known anyone other than her dad, she’s never used electricity, and she’s never heard music.  During her mission, Hanna finds herself in a vibrant world of fascinating enticements, and a chance encounter with a family of tourists makes her contemplate the idea of a normal life.

I’ve decided I definitely like Joe Wright as a director.  He first caught my attention in Atonement, and while I loved Anna Karenina, I wasn’t sure how much to put on Wright vs. Tom Stoppard.  This, though, is just a stunningly-shot movie.  The action is crisp, cool, and exciting, but it’s also beautiful – I’m in love with the sequence of Hanna breaking out of a CIA holding facility.  The camera really knows how to follow her in her discovery of the world outside the tiny scrap of isolated wilderness she’s known, making everyday things like laundry or oscillating fans seem extraordinary, as if we’re seeing them for the first time right along with Hanna.  Put together with Atonement and Anna Karenina, this movie makes me want to give Wright’s version of Pride and Prejudice another shot (something tells me I’d still be dissatisfied with the overall film, but viewed more objectively, I may find there’s something to love in the direction.)

Hanna’s ignorance, or rather, her mere textbook understanding of the world at large is one of the movie’s most intriguing threads, and I do love it.  That said, it is a pretty large plot hole.  Since her mission will require her to do quite a bit of international travel on her own, it seems short-sighted of her dad to only read her descriptions of things like electricity or music.  While she can provide for herself, she’s wildly conspicuous, notable to whoever she meets.  She looks and acts like someone who’s never seen civilization, which makes it easy for the bad guys to track her.  If her dad had exposed her to that kind of stuff, she’d be able to hide much better in plain sight.

Saoirse Ronan (still best known to me as young Briony in Atonement) is excellent as Hanna, showing her detached proficiency beginning to crack as she encounters a world she’s never known.  Eric Bana does a nice job as her dad, and on the antagonistic side, Cate Blanchett and her hired gun Tom Hollander both deliver.  The movie also features Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) and the always-great Olivia Williams.

Warnings

Lots of violence, swearing, a little sexual content, and thematic elements.

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