The following is a slightly re-edited version of a review I wrote for the fanzine CAPRA.
As I mentioned when writing about The Bride with White Hair, along with their action movies, the fantasy movies that came out of Hong Kong in the 80’s and 90’s, from what I’ve seen of them, were real adult fairy tales. With the exception of the Lord of the Rings, few fantasy movies to come out Hollywood were as thrilling as the ones from Hong Kong, and didn’t feel like adult fairy tales, with the exception of Joe Wright’s Hanna.
The movie even has a fairy-tale beginning; once upon a time, there was a teenage girl named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) who lived in the forests of Finland with her father Erik Heller (Eric Bana), a former CIA agent now in hiding. Although he’s taught her all kinds of practical things, like how to hunt for food (we first see her shooting a deer, and saying to it, “I just missed your heart”, before killing it for good), how to speak several different languages, and various facts about the world (he uses encyclopedias), the main thing Heller has trained her to do is to be a fighter, and a killer if necessary (in their first scene together, he says she’s dead because he sneaked up on her without her knowing. She attacks him in response), drilling into her the motto, “Attack or die”. One thing she hasn’t any training for is the outside world, and like any girl of that age, Hanna is curious to see it. After some thought, Heller finally agrees, and shows her a box that will signal to the outside world where they are. Specifically, Heller has in mind Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), Heller’s old boss at the CIA. Sure enough, when the CIA picks up the signal and tells Wiegler, she insists she and her team can handle things herself (she also burns Heller’s file). Heller has escaped by the time they get there, but Hanna is there waiting. She’s taken into interrogation at a nearby safehouse, where a doctor asks her questions, and while she answers them in a dry monotone, she asks to speak to Wiegler. Wiegler, no fool, sends a double (Michelle Dockery) in to speak for her. However, even she’s unprepared for what happens next; after confirming “Marissa’s” identity, Hanna starts to cry, the two of them hug, and then Hanna snaps her neck, killing her. Not only that, but she easily subdues the soldiers sent in after her and she escapes.
From there, Hanna is supposed to meet her father at Grimm Park (a theme park) in Germany, and after she escapes, she sets out to do just that. After going through a long tunnel, she ends up in Morocco (the safehouse was nearby). She meets a kind old man in a village, but is unused to the modern world and is freaked out by it (her reaction to a teapot and then a television is memorable). She also meets up with Sophie (Jessica Barden), a pop culture obsessed teen of the same age, who is with her somewhat hippie-ish parents Rachel (Olivia Williams) and Sebastian (Jason Flemyng), and her younger brother Miles (Aldo Maland) as they trek across the country, and befriends them. She’s taken with their closeness as a family, while they are charmed, if mystified, by her earnestness and naivete (her idea of being nice is to kill rabbits for breakfast for them, and when Sophie arranges for the two of them to go on a double date, let’s just say it doesn’t end well). Meanwhile, of course, Marissa is hot on their trail, recruiting Isaacs (Tom Hollander), an assassin who runs a club in Germany, to follow and either capture or kill Hanna and her father.
The original script by Seth Lochhead (which twice made the Black List for best unproduced screenplay) was apparently a lot grittier and more realistic, until Wright and new writer David Farr did a rewrite to push it more into fairy tale territory. I have no idea how the grittier version would have played, but the fairy tale aspect work beautifully. Without ever hitting us over the head with it, Wright drops visual fairy tale motifs into the story, even before we get to Grimm Park, what with the seeming rabbit hole Hanna emerges from in Morocco, the fact Hanna uses arrows to kill animals with (and, on occasion, people), the way Marissa is always obsessed with cleaning her teeth, and so on. The music score by the Chemical Brothers also gives the movie a slightly unreal quality; although there’s pulse-pounding music as is their trademark, it’s also slightly otherworldly and exotic, especially the music that plays in Isaacs’ nightclub (the fact he whistles it at one point while on the hunt makes him seem even creepier). Grimm Park, of course, is where all the elements come into play; production designer Sarah Greenwood either built, or located, elements such as a small, old-fashioned cottage and animal structures such as a wolf’s head (which Marissa emerges from at one point), and although it isn’t red, Hanna wears a hoodie during the whole sequence. This movie has compared to Kick-Ass, which I still haven’t seen, but that movie is advertised as more comic-book in tone, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek (with Nicolas Cage as one of the stars, I guess that comes with the territory); this, on the other hand, despite the heightened elements, is played more seriously.
I’ve gone back and forth on Wright as a director. His adaptation of Pride & Prejudice was a bit rougher than previous versions, but I thought the tone worked surprisingly well; only the performance of Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet didn’t quite work for me (she was fine in the comic moments, but wasn’t able to do the serious moments as well). I liked her much more in Atonement (I also thought Ronan, who played her younger sister, was terrific as well), but the movie itself seemed overdone and forced, and the final revelation didn’t play as well for me as it did in the novel. Considering that, it was surprising once again to find him on a more even keel with The Soloist, taking what could have been a mawkish “heartwarming” tale, and, thanks to restraint and good performances, making it honestly heartwarming. This may seem like strange training for an action director, but he makes the jump surprisingly well. I though his long takes in Atonement were just showing off, but he and cinematographer Alwin Kuchler (who also shot Morvern Caller for Lynne Ramsey and The Claim for Michael Winterbottom) stage one here where Heller is pursued in a train station and fights off a series of attackers that works brilliantly. There’s a lot more to why Hanna is able to fight and kill like she can, and Wright, Farr, and Lochhead are able to piece the information out slowly and achieving the right balance; never making us too impatient, yet making it logical and wrapping it up just right at the end, without making it seem like fan-wanking at the end. Also, while some have griped at the prospect of another girl action figure, Wright never eroticizes or fetishizes Hanna, instead just treating her as a somewhat abnormal girl who has normal wants, desires, fears, and curiosities.
Of course, the performances also go a long way towards making this work. Williams and Flemyng don’t get much to do as the couple, but they are convincing as a couple. Barden played a similar role to Sophie in the previous year’s Tamara Drewe, if with slightly more depth, and she steals every scene she’s in here. Hollander, doing a 180-degree turn from his somewhat clueless government minister from In The Loop, is memorably creepy here, as mentioned above. Bana does his best work in years as Hanna’s father, especially in the scene where Hanna finds out the truth about how she became to be how she is. But the two who make it work are Blanchett and Ronan. As I alluded to above, Marissa is sort of playing the Big Bad Wolf (though in interviews, Blanchett has also half-joked about how she sees the story as a somewhat twisted version of Kramer vs. Kramer), and Blanchett does employ a southern accent throughout, but she never camps it up, playing a straight version of a cold and steely agent willing to do whatever it takes (although she lets some vulnerability creep through in the scene where she’s asked about ever having children, and she says, “I made certain choices”). Ronan is not only convincing in all of the fight scenes, but she also makes every aspect of Hanna convincing, from her steeliness in fights to her cluelessness about the outside world and her touching desire to want to connect with Sophie and her family. She delivers the first line of the movie (“I just missed your heart”) again near the end, but she gives the movie its heart, and its power.
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Note: As it turns out, Farr ended up making a TV series (for Amazon) that was done with a more realistic tone, and while Esme Creed-Miles did a fine job playing the title role, the series ultimately didn’t measure up to the movie.
