Hanna

Posted by abby on April 22, 2011

I’m a woman of simple needs when it comes to movies. To my mind, a really good film hits at least three out of four criteria. I want to be entertained. I want good writing (including a good story). The acting needs to be convincing. And, finally, the movie needs to look good and be made intelligently. If you get these parts right, everything else will fall into place. If you don’t, it’s much harder to recover.

“Hanna” is a movie that hits nearly all the right spots. It’s wonderfully stylized, and as entertaining as you’d expect, while keeping its head. But the spot it misses is a big one: story. The dialogue and plot development in this movie depend more on showing than telling. While this is a positive characteristic in most other films, with “Hanna,” the script relies too much on showing, and too little on telling, leaving a lot to be desired.

The story, despite initial appearances, is so simple it’s almost nonexistent. Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) lives with her father (Eric Bana) in a wintry forest. He’s trained her to be an efficient little killer, with one purpose in life: to hunt down C.I.A. agent Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett) and kill her. The day Hanna completes her training, she flips the switch on a signal that will lead Weigler’s people to her, and the hunt is on.

Seth Lochhead and David Farr’s spare script structures the story like a fairytale and the film is filled with elements that won’t let you forget that. Hanna and her father plan to rendezvous at Wilhelm Grimm’s house, for example. Another scene has Blanchett’s icy Weigler standing in front of a wolf’s mouth. It’s an intriguingly dark concept, and, like a lot of fairy tales, doesn’t include much plot or character development apart from Hanna herself, only characters who serve as obstacles or points of assistance along the way. The most entertaining is a hippie family Hanna tags along with—the always enjoyable Olivia Williams is particularly fun as the mother. Tom Hollander is also good as a creepy assassin who wears impeccably clean track suits and tennis whites, and surrounds himself with a gang of skinheads.

Major props also to director Joe Wright, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted the film to look and feel like. His uses of lighting, editing and music are excellent, all razor sharp and timed precisely. Wright is apparently responsible for reuniting the Chemical Brothers to do “Hanna’s” music, a choice that fits this movie as perfectly as Daft Punk’s “Tron Legacy” score. It appears, in comparing Wright’s previous work like “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement” with “Hanna” that the director’s no costume-drama pansy filmmaker. Wright’s a versatile, visual director with an eye for detail, and “Hanna” is the project that lets him show audiences what he’s really made of, outside the realm of corsets and courtesy.

But that script…it’s a problem. While “Hanna” is full of visual symbolism, the story has next to none; no greater concept, no moral (which, given its fairytale styling, is a bit disappointing). This would be fine if it told an exciting story with a cast of compelling characters, but it doesn’t really have that, either. It’s an odd conundrum, since a beefier script would have messed up the film’s coldly brilliant aesthetic, but in order for “Hanna” to fully work as a movie, the extra development is exactly what it needs. It feels skeletal.

“Hanna” is a very well-made movie. It’s flashy and well-constructed. The actors give effective performances, and there’s a good amount of tongue-in-cheek humor to match the onscreen action and tension. But it’s not a warm or full movie, by any means. The lack of character development or explanation of motivations beyond the bare necessities leaves audiences with a movie that looks fantastic, but feels hollow. As a result, “Hanna” is a movie that settles for being very good instead of aspiring toward greatness.

The Verdict:

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