Friday, April 8, 2011

It’s interesting, even sad, to me that there’s been such a tendency to scramble towards action-oriented takes on fairy tales in Hollywood these days. Alice In Wonderland made a bundle of cash and ever since, everything that’s even slightly popular is either getting pushed through the wheels of Twilight or rearranged to have grittier characters and massive bloodshed. I can see the appeal of the fairytale as a remake: these are characters with hundreds of years of built-in audience with stories so ingrained in our collective consciousness that promotional material becomes more of a reminder than a sell. These stories are buried so deep in to the minds of many of today’s film makers though, it seems preposterous to return to the original text, when a studio could support a film like Joe Wright’s Hanna, one that creates an original fairytale, albeit one told in reverse. What Wright has done in the making of Hanna is to build on the stepping stones crafted by the fairytale weavers of yore, and make a beautiful, near-perfect bit of fairytale all his own.

Review - Hanna

In the icy far north of Europe, a little girl, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) and her father Eric (Eric Bana) live in a tiny candlelit hut surrounded by snow. During the day they hunt and Eric teaches his young, snow-angel looking daughter to, well, kill. One day, Hanna says she’s ready and out comes an extremely governmental looking box with a button and beacon and Hanna’s future all neatly packaged. When Hanna presses the button she sets off a series of events that she’s been preparing for her entire life, a cross-continent sprint across Europe to put an end to the woman, Marissa (Cate Blanchett) that killed her mother. Even writing it, the echoes of fairytales past seem to fill the spaces between words and Wright plays to this strength. The movie, to be blunt, is a fucking trip somewhere between The Professional and several hits of extremely strong acid. Hanna ends up very quickly being caught by a cadre of soldiers and her escape through the military complex she’s being held in, to the throbbing noise of The Chemical Brothers, becomes a strobe-lit gateway to the rest of the film. And the rest of the film is pretty much that, Hanna runs to find her father and escape the forces that conspire to kill her. Along the way she sneaks aboard a camper stocked with the sort of family she’s never had. She makes friends with the daughter of the family, and her exploration of this newfound world is one of the great pleasures of the film. A great pleasure that allows the brutal violence that punctuates the film even more shocking, and I greedily awaited each and every moment Hanna’s latent violent abilities sprung to the surface.

The film is, as I’ve said before, beautifully shot. The opening scenes of Hanna in the crystalline sunlight of a Northern Finland are gorgeous and dreamy, an imagined world where one might think teenage assassins actually do live. Wright pulls out every trick in the filmmaking book - dutch angles, spinning cameras, ultra closeups, super-saturated color, everything - and the film is all the better for it. Joe Wright has created a world that looks like ours, if ours had been born from the loins of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. And he populates this mildly fairytale world with the archetypes that our Hollywood system is currently mining - three evil trolls stalk Hanna across Europe (played dangerously gay by Tom Hollands and a duo of skin-headed youth); Cate Blanchett’s Marissa is all toothy, drawling Evil Queen; Hanna’s father is the epitome of the grizzled hunter - they are all there just pushed in to a skewed reality of Joe Wright’s making.

The fairytale aspect of Hanna is an impressive one not just because of the visual palette but because of its arc. The film begins in an icy land of fairytales with a little girl keen to explore the world outside her little hut. When given the chance though, the fairytale reality quickly shifts, our heroine is forced in to a world that becomes less and less like a fairytale (both visually and narratively) until she’s actually being chased through an amusement park based on the stories of her youth. The fairytale world Joe Wright has created becomes inverted, and suddenly with the symbols of myths past looming above her, it becomes very clear that the life set out for Hanna is remarkably unlike a fairytale. These looming sculptures of dinosaurs and giant wolf heads mark a clear concept: our world is one that has the potential of looking like a fairytale, but never, never actually being one.

I could say so much more about this film - the brilliance of the casting, the impressive display of acting by Saoirse Ronan, the unfurling of the incredible script - but I’ll just say this: Joe Wright has made easily the best movie of the year so far, and a strong contender for one of the best films of the new decade. Go see this writ large across the big screen and if you don’t, hunker down in to your cave with a box of tissues, ‘cause you’re going to be a sad, sad film lover.

- Noah Sanders -



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