‘Hanna’ Delivers the Goods on a Grand Scale

Some faces were meant for the big screen, and Saoirse Ronan has one of them.

Her eerily clear blue eyes are incapable of lying, even while at their most deceitful. The angular contours of her subdued expression suggest a budding maturity and freckled innocence, often within the same take. It’s an entrancing face, well loved by the camera of filmmaker Joe Wright. 

In his 2007 melodrama, Atonement, Wright cast Ronan as a wildly imaginative girl whose corrosive jealousy causes her to lie. Even at the mere age of 13, Ronan’s impenetrable poker face proved to be utterly hypnotic, and ended up garnering her an Oscar nomination.

Hanna marks the actress’s second collaboration with Wright, and it’s guaranteed to solidify her status as one of the most gifted young performers in modern cinema, placing her in the same snug category as Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Chloe Moretz (Kick Ass), Liana Liberato (Trust) and Elle Fanning (Somewhere). 

It’s wonderful to see a visually exuberant director like Wright tackle a project that is essentially an epically mounted lark. Unlike Zack Snyder’s joyless, self-important Sucker Punch, Hanna refuses to pretend it’s anything more than what it is. Whereas Snyder’s single-minded focus on spectacle causes his narratives to routinely become dramatically inert, Wright ensures that the mechanics of each set piece are tied directly to the nerve endings of his characters, thus playing on the pulse of the audience as if it were a metronome. 

Seth Lochhead and David Farr’s script unfolds like the Paul Greengrass adaptation of a particularly grisly tale concocted by the Brothers Grimm. The film begins in the snow-covered stealth of a hunt, as the titular heroine advances on her unsuspecting prey. She’s spent her entire life training under the tutelage of her father, Erik (Eric Bana), a former CIA operative hiding out in the wilderness. By practicing martial arts, mastering various accents and acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, Hanna is being systematically prepared for a showdown with her assigned arch-nemesis, Marissa (Cate Blanchett), an operative with a severe hairdo and a sinister southern twang. 

How exactly Marissa fits into Hanna’s back story is gradually revealed as the film progresses. Thankfully, the picture is never bogged down by excessive passages of tiresome exposition. Wright has always respected cinema as a visual medium, and frequently finds inventive ways to convey a multitude of ideas through his exquisitely choreographed imagery. His five-minute tracking shot along the Dunkirk beach in Atonement spoke more volumes about the chaos of a soldier’s life than any number of anti-war monologues.

There are a few similarly spellbinding sequences in Hanna, notably the extended shot of Erik’s descent underground, where he engages in hand-to-hand combat with a roomful of foes. Some critics have dismissed Wright as an indulgent showoff, but I disagree. His long takes have an immersive impact on a viewer’s gaze, which is allowed the freedom to scour the screen for details. They also build tension with the same impeccable attention to rhythm as a frantically edited montage.

Wright’s longtime editor, Paul Tothill, superbly visualizes the disorientation of Hanna’s heightened psyche when placed in an unfamiliar world. The fable-like timelessness of the film’s early passages makes Hanna’s entrance into modern civilization all the more jarring. After deciding that she’s ready to be hunted, Hanna temporarily parts ways with Erik, before being captured by the CIA.

During the Friday night screening I attended, the theater full of giddy teenage girls squealed in delight when Hanna swiftly escaped from Marissa’s clutches, after disposing of her colleagues in electrifying fashion.

Thrust into the world on her own, Hanna displays her vast knowledge of human behavior with little understanding of its emotional connotations. When asked for a kiss on a spontaneous date, she recites the biological analytics of such an act without appearing to comprehend its purpose. She later plants a chaste kiss on Sophie (Jessica Barden), the first true friend she’s ever encountered.

After lighting up the screen in Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe, Barden proves again to be a natural-born scene stealer, delivering motormouth riffs that are part teenage angst, part bold conviction and part gleeful insanity.

If there’s any sizable flaw in the picture, it’s the easily guessable climactic plot twist, which should be of no surprise to any fan of the Bourne franchise. Yet audiences will most likely be willing to accept a dose of predictability in a brew as richly flavorful as this one. So many scenes bring unexpected delight, such as Hanna’s hilarious dinner conversation with Sophie’s family or the tense moment when Marissa realizes that the voice on the other end of her phone is much closer than she expected.  

Throughout it all, Ronan is unable to hit a single inauthentic note. Her performance delivers on the tremendous promise of her previous work and seems poised to make her a star of the highest caliber. When a thug asks if Hanna had turned out as Marissa had hoped, the statuesque villainess replies, “Better.” I couldn’t agree more.

Hanna raked in $12.3 million in box office receipts in its weekend debut, behind the No. 1 ticket seller Hop at $21.6 million and the remake of Authur at $12.6 million, according to the website Box Office Mojo. 

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