Everything you need to know about Joe Wright is contained in the Dunkirk sequence in Atonement, one of the greatest and most misguided pieces of virtuoso style in recent years. Directing his second film after the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice, Wright staged the Allies’ retreat from Normandy in the early days of WW2 – a bloody, shambolic disaster where thousands died – as a single five-minute shot ranging over half a mile of beach and hundreds of extras. The scene was crucially important, since our hero was among the wounded soldiers – but nobody cared, because all the audience could think about was ‘Wow, what a shot!’ and ‘Setting this up must’ve taken ages’.
Wright is a toybox director: he approaches filmmaking like a child with a toybox, having fun with his camera even when it may be distracting or inappropriate. Sometimes that’s a fault; other times it’s wonderful – and Hanna is one of those other times, a baroque pseudo-fairytale about a teenage girl (Saoirse Ronan) who’s been trained as the world’s greatest assassin. It combines coming-of-age drama – it’s no coincidence that the young girl’s mission is to destroy (and implicitly replace) a woman – with action, Bourne-style spy thriller and surreal black-comedy bits, yet at no point does it take place in the real world, so Wright’s cartoony style works well. Towards the end, when Hanna (our heroine) has an absurd conversation with a magician named Mr. Grimm, with fey little dance steps followed by a burst of classical music, it makes you swoon with pleasure to see such things in the same head-space as a big action movie.
The opening recalls The American (another film about a steely, machine-like assassin), set in the snowy wilds of Finland where Hanna’s being trained by her father (Eric Bana). Dad’s methods recall Dogtooth, keeping his daughter far away from the outside world – she screams with joy and excitement when a plane passes overhead, obviously the first time she’s seen one: “It’s like thunder, it was so beautiful!” – and it even looks for a while that Hanna might be seduced by pop-culture (when she’s briefly entranced by TV), like the girl in Dogtooth, though it doesn’t really happen. The set-up also recalls the Stieg Larsson Girl trilogy, a feral young girl with hints of past abuse, and Hanna’s way with violence recalls Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass – yet Hanna is finally its own thing, a conspicuously designed film (even the font for the opening title is unusual) that makes a virtue of its silliness.
Wright works the scenes as flashily as he did that Dunkirk sequence in Atonement. The main chase, when Hanna escapes from a CIA prison, throbs with a strobe-light effect and pulsating music as she runs through cavernous tunnels – Ronan has a wiry gazelle grace – then, for a punchline, has her climbing up through a shaft only to find her head popping out of a manhole in the middle of a rocky desert that looks like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote will be whizzing by at any moment (the whole image is pure cartoon). Later we get a blond hitman who whistles while he works – he’s first encountered in a seedy bar where a hermaphrodite gyrates onstage – and a hilariously right-on English family whose chubby teenage daughter (Jessica Barden, the celeb-obsessed girl in Tamara Drewe) becomes Hanna’s friend, though the sheltered assassin doesn’t really follow all the talk of boob-jobs and supermodels. Not to mention Cate Blanchett as the Big Bad Wolf, a ruthless CIA bitch with a penchant for flossing her teeth till she draws blood.
Hanna never stops being absurd. A scene where our heroine lies in bed alongside her new teenage friend gets huge extreme close-ups of the girls’ eyes and milky skin – not the kind of subtle intensity that might’ve hinted at a lesbian subtext, but a loopy effect closer to a Leslie Nielsen spoof. Yet it’s good absurdity, tricksy and highly entertaining. There are markets in Morocco and breaks for song in Spain. The hackneyed scene of Hanna doing a Google search morphs into a garish montage of deformed-looking bodies and newspaper headlines. The blond hitman shows up toting a bow and arrow. Hanna is courted by a boy, responds with facts and figures – “Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles” – then puts him in a headlock. The film confirms the impression gleaned from Atonement, of Wright as a flamboyant director with a strong visual sense and no real sensitivity. In this case, that’s good enough.
DIRECTED BY Joe Wright
STARRING Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett
US/Germany 2011 111 mins.
