Feeling like your parents are cramping your style is a teenage rite of passage. But Erik (Eric Bana), the helicopter father of Hanna (2011), is so restrictive to his title-character daughter (Saoirse Ronan) that she’s never been able to develop one to begin with. The two live in a compound of sorts in rural, punishingly icy northern Finland where Erik forbids any contact with the outside world. Made further alien to us with her piercing blue eyes and white-blond hair and eyebrows, Hanna isn’t allowed to listen to music or engage with any other form of culture, either. Time has to be reserved for this 15-year-old to be fastidiously trained in combat and shooting, presumably to turn her into a world-class assassin. (Because it’s hard to be a potential master of international espionage without a handful of languages up your sleeve, Erik has also taught Hanna how to be fluent in several, commanding her to switch it up on a sentence-by-sentence basis to keep things sharp.) Hanna loves her father, but as would be expected for a teen growing more conscious of her personhood her itches for a life in the real world are starting to turn that love into rashy resentment.
We won’t get a full explanation of Erik’s freakish protectiveness until the end of Hanna. But the inklings we get early on — that he used to work for the CIA and that he knows a secret his old handler, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), is willing to kill both him and Hanna over — function well enough while guiding what eventually morphs into a standard-fare chase thriller. Because of a naïve move on Hanna’s part, Wiegler is alerted to her and Erik’s whereabouts. He scrams before Hanna does. The rest of the film becomes both about their reunion and the daughter-father pair’s separate quests to evade capture.
Hanna is one of few distinct blips in Joe Wright’s filmography. Since his 2005 debut, Pride & Prejudice, the British director has become most associated with awards-baiting period pieces, with 2007’s Atonement widely agreed to be the best coalescing of his gifts. Hanna plays like Wright having a laugh — attempting a genre he’d always wanted to wade into because he’d at last achieved the kind of status able to get the check signed.
Hanna is most thrilling during its first and final stretches, the former familiarizing us with its eponymous character’s intense, secluded existence with some intriguing clues into its context, the latter indulging in the action-thriller excitement most of us had turned on the movie expecting. But the long middle section of Hanna reveals a movie unfocused, spending too much time on an uninteresting, action-starved subplot where Hanna hides out with an oblivious British family on an international road trip. (She crosses paths with them in Morocco.)
Blanchett’s performance is Hanna‘s most consistent delight, her Wiegler gifted a menacingly polite Southern drawl and almost always flashing a scarily white set of teeth she brushes so obsessively that her gums bleed. But the movie, understandably, is keener on spending time with its teenage assassin marveling at the sights of an unknown world finally revealing themselves far more than she gets to actually do anything compelling as a character. With a half-hour or so chopped off, Hanna might have been a niftily thrilling, endearingly odd chase. But in its finished form it exemplifies the type of final product a filmmaker dreads: the film likely more exciting and dynamic as a pitch than as a movie.
Peterson Reviews 