Hanna
Directed by Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Hanna is an unabashed action picture that is immediately striking and bold and extremely outlandish in its material. But let us get introduced to director Joe Wright. He knows how to fill his screen with dazzlingly poetic images that have the tendency to make our hearts melt. Just reference his previous films, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Completely removed from the conditions in which he feels most comfortable, Wright’s departure for action and brutal violence may seem like an awkward position for him after his pleasantly romantic films. But in his newest feature, Hanna, written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, Wright shows a significant increase in ability when he laces the beautiful with shuddering images of viciousness. Instead of trivializing violence with imprecise material and ineffective scenes, the film expresses all of its complexities, mechanisms, and emotions in a rock-n-roll kind of way (thanks to a hypnotic score by The Chemical Brothers) through exotic and bizarre locales.
In a way Wright personifies violence. Of course this kind of attachment to violence is constantly reproached in cinema. Only a few films find it ripe for artistic exhibition (No Country for Old Men and A Clockwork Orange). And instead of these rare movies leaving us with painful memories, they blissfully torment us because behind all the carnage they present to us (and it is a lot of carnage), after looking past it, there remains a lesson to be learned, one that weighs on us like a nightmare.
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