Hanna: wild thing runs fast

Our titular adolescent home-schooled superathlete (Saoirse Ronan) grows up near the North Pole receiving instruction in hunting and fighting by her survivalist dad with a past (Eric Bana). When she’s finally ready to leave their frozen nest she does so knowing that a certain nefarious CIA operative (Cate Blanchett) will instantly be out to kill dad and maybe do something worse to her: there are intimations that she’s got some sort of top-secret experimental juice in her genes. A genuine wild child whose knowledge of culture has been culled entirely from a slim encyclopedia but whose strength and agility is ninjalike, Hanna’s story slides between her discovering the world and her killing a whole lot of people in it. (Though, if it makes you feel better, she doesn’t seem to enjoy her displays of lethal child-violence nearly as much as Chloë Moretz does in Kick-Ass.)

Director Joe Wright reportedly inherited the project from Danny Boyle, to whom Hanna, with its pulsing chase narrative, techno-friendliness and air of childish awe, seems more naturally suited. But then again, Wright, who previously helmed Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, hasn’t really distinguished himself as being naturally suited for anything besides ultra-high production values, which he exploits very professionally (and I don’t use that word casually). Employing jump cuts, flashing lights and the Chemical Brothers, Wright seems eager to shake off the stateliness of his extant work, get the blood pumping, and start acting his age (he’s not yet 40). Some of this is pretty fun and intriguing, but it’s also uneven and confused, its sci-fi aspects are barely even glazed over, and I’m just not sure what to make it as a whole. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to eschew certain globalized thriller conventions (there are no titles announcing our current location being typed over establishing shots) and focus on sensation over story (a good thing since David Farr and Seth Lochhead’s sub-Bourne script is riddled with gaping holes: where did our snowy middle-of-nowhere forest-spawned Hanna learn to use handguns and personal computers anyway?), but if my praise feels miserly it’s just that Wright’s rebooted stylistics feel tacked on much of the time, more schematic than suasive. Bizarrely, Wright claims to be influenced here by David Lynch, while Hanna feels so much more like less trigger-happy (with regards to both guns and editing) Tony Scott.

But okay, I think I can spot the Lynch-pin. There are some roaming kooky villains on little Hanna’s trail. The sadistic leader (Tom Hollander, who it must be said really seems to having a great time) wears silly jumpsuits and does a little soft-shoe while interrogating an English family in a yard full of shipping containers, all very theatrical. His underlings are all skinheads, because apparently it’s easy as pie to find neo-Nazis just hanging around in North Africa, right? Does self-consciously quirky, menacing nonsense constitute a “Lynchian” touch? Perhaps if you don’t watch Lynch’s films very carefully. Or at all.

Cate Blanchett in pantyhose

Robin Hood: Sowing the seeds of pseudo socialism in a not terribly merry old England

In these times of economic uncertainty it’s reassuring to know that way back in days of yore really good-looking men and women of courage, honesty, and sound grooming stood up against simpering pansy monarchs and really ugly Frenchmen and shot razor-sharp kindling through their ugly-ass necks in the hope of installing some primitive form of socialism in a largely grubby agrarian world. Or maybe it’s supposed to be primitive libertarianism. I mean, who likes taxes? And get a load of all those arrows! The arrow budget for Robin Hood was probably larger than the entire budget for some actual armed revolutions, but what, did you think this was a Ken Loach film?

Helmed by Ridley Scott, written by sledgehammer screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and starring Scott’s favoured gladiator and co-producer Russell Crowe, this Robin Hood goes back to the roots of the legend, I guess, with His Majesty’s archer Robin Longstride (Crowe, fierce, rugged, kind of bland) coming home from the Crusades to an England in chaos, with a new, really dumb king (Oscar Isaac, shouty, pouty, grating) trying to bleed his citizenry for a few more goblet studs and a two-timing royal advisor pal (Mark Strong, pleasingly evil) quietly trying to sneak the French over for a major invasion. Robin heads to Nottingham to deliver a dead man’s sword to his dad (Max von Sydow, having a hoot playing older and frailer than he really is) and winds up impersonating the dead man so as to assure that the land stays in the family once dad dies and his lovely daughter-in-law Marian (Cate Blanchett, trying her darndest) is left on her own, a proto-feminist about eight centuries too early to get what’s rightfully hers. Screwball flirtations bubble up between Robin and his faux-bride, the taxmen come to pillage and destroy, the Frenchies are crossing the Channel, and the rest is history as semi-comprehensible battle sequences, rife with careening crane shots. And arrows.

Okay, actually the rest involves cartloads of exposition you’ll never quite piece together, completely unnecessary flashbacks to Robin's misremembered childhood, cornball dialogue, big speeches rife with empty rhetoric, and Scott and company’s best attempt at re-doing the storming of the beach in Normandy from Saving Private Ryan. Only fitfully diverting, this adventure epic is far too bloated to be as rousing as it wants to be. Scott’s an old hand with managing elaborate set pieces, but the results don’t feel inspired this time out. His brother Tony always gets dissed for being the lesser, more vulgar director, but, you know what, stupid as it was, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 was a lot more fun.

Jim Jarmusch and the vice squad: sitting down for a hot dose of Coffee and Cigarettes

Addictive, unhealthy and socially unacceptable, the twin vices that inspire and give shape to Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes are, like cinema or conversation, capable of providing the purest of pleasures when experienced in the simplest of circumstances and with minimal distractions. Jarmusch has always been one of our finest practitioners of comic minimalism; although his films never seem bound by a rigourous, predetermined structure, they rely on formal constraints and carefully chosen repetitions to give them shape, tone, humour and, most rewardingly, meaning. The 11 short films that make up Coffee and Cigarettes give me such meditative pleasure because they feel loose enough to potentially slide off in any direction at any moment, and yet they whirl around within a tight enough thematic and visual landscape to allow me to participate vicariously in their subtlety, wit, cheeky philosophizing and finely-honed charm.

The films were shot between 1986 (the year Jarmusch made Down by Law) and the present, though most were made fairly recently, a sign that Jarmusch took plenty of time discovering the most appropriate context in which to create and present them, picking up a gag from one piece, a stray idea from another, until the final work felt like much more than just the sum of its parts. Each piece, naturally enough, centres around a table and two or three individuals, many of them familiar from Jarmusch’s previous works, smoking, talking and riding out a caffeine buzz. And nearly all, photographed in lovely black and white by some of the world’s finest cinematographers—like Frederick Elmes, Tom DiCillo and Robby Müller—feature eloquent overhead shots of checkered tabletops, dingy espresso cups, grimy ashtrays and scattered spoons that amount to the most painstaking fetishization of diner/café culture I’ve ever seen. (And as a connoisseur of the greasy spoon, I write this with absolute affection.)

The first piece, though by far the most overtly absurdist of the bunch, sets the tone nicely, with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meeting at a café, their familiarity with each other not especially clear, but bonding over their love of caffeine and nicotine before arranging a bizarre trade-off of personal duties, sort of a playful, banal version of Strangers on a Train. The young Benigni is oddly handsome and hilarious, while the cooler Wright provides one of the film’s funniest recurring notions: drinking lots of coffee before bed makes you dream faster. This is just one of several epiphanies surrounding consciousness, health and bad habits that build in silly sophistication over the course of the film.

In most of the pieces the actors essentially play themselves rather than characters, and the tension between these loners, eccentrics and famous or semi-famous people that we see in the scene between Benigni and Wright is echoed throughout: Tom Waits and Iggy Pop meet "Somewhere in California" and seem incapable of getting past their discomfort with each other’s peculiar celebrity; waiters struggle to balance the implied familiarity of their roles with customers; Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA are so starstruck by Bill Murray (clumsily and hilariously disguised as a cook) that they continually refer to him by his full name; a glamorous Cate Blanchett, in the film’s most technically impressive piece, squirms in the company of her resentful cousin (also played by Blanchett, in a rock-chick get-up that makes her look like Kate Bush). And in what is perhaps the all-around best piece, Alfred Molina sets up a meeting with fellow British actor Steve Coogan (the brilliant star of 24 Hour Party People) that becomes utterly stripped of conventional niceties by the two men’s mid-level celebrity status and the ridiculous hierarchy they perceive between them. Jarmusch is something of a dramatic purist in his ongoing interest in the follies of everyday communication (witness the role of linguistic barriers in several of his films) and the episodic nature of Coffee and Cigarettes allows him to attend to such scenarios with greater focus then ever.

Coffee and Cigarettes closes with a surprisingly poignant and beautiful piece featuring Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who sit in a dim and dusty warehouse of inky shadows, drinking bad coffee, apparently on a break from whatever sort of paid work these two old guys could possibly be doing. A man sweeps the floor laconically somewhere behind them as Mead begins fantasizing about being somewhere else, explaining that, like the title of Gustav Mahler’s melancholy song (which the two catch a few bars of somewhere in the ether), he feels that he’s "lost track of the world." Mead suggests they pretend the coffee is champagne and they share a toast to better times. And at that moment the toast seems shared by all of us, a toast to the space that Coffee and Cigarettes inhabits, a place of refuge from the noise of the world and the demoralizing effects of modern life, a place where someone like Jarmusch can produce films outside the oppressive box of narrative commercial filmmaking. A place where things can move along with the ease of great conversation or sweet music and we have the freedom to indulge in the simple pleasures of life.

I'm Not There: A mosaic of persona, with each of us in the mix

Save the imminently memorable closing image fade-out, Bob Dylan, or any direct representation of Bob Dylan, is, strictly speaking, nowhere to be found, nor ever mentioned, in Todd Haynes’ new movie, a biopic –or is it perhaps an anti-biopic– about Bob Dylan. Rather, we get a slyly assembled sextet of Dylanesques and Dylanguises: Dylan as a riddle-smith Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Dylan as Woody Guthrie as a black little kid (Marcus Carl Franklin), Dylan as one Jack Rollins, the remote avatar of troubled social conscience who later finds God and polyester suits (Christian Bale), Dylan as an actor playing Jack Rollins in a mid-60s biopic (Heath Ledger), Dylan as a drug-addled, gender-blending provocateur on tour in England (Cate Blanchett, in the role closest to a recognizable Dylan, circa Don’t Look Back), Dylan as Billy the Kid in hiding after faking his death (Richard Gere). Among the countless conceptual marvels on display here is the forming of a mosaic of personas that collectively embody our collective Dylan, with not a single one of them staking any claims on any sort of definitive biographical portrait. I’m Not There, indeed.

It sounds like a radical exercise in semiotics. It is. (Godard looms over the film as much as Dylan.) It’s about the paradox of a popular artist’s obligation to speak only for himself while also speaking for all of us, and the accompanying schisms this incites between his private and public life. Crucially, it’s about the unavoidability of politics playing into personal expression. But can I please ensure you that it’s also wild and vibrant, often giddily entertaining and funny, and, at it’s very best, absolutely heartbreaking and unexpectedly cathartic. It is also, like anything hoisted up with such vision and audacity, flawed –some parts just work better than others– yet to remove any of its individual parts would render it far more flawed. All this is to say I’m Not There ain’t no Ray or Walk the Line. This isn’t your Auntie Linda’s biopic. But for god’s sake see it already. And take your Auntie Linda along with you. After all, it’s about the 1960s.

Did I mention the tremendous music? I’m Not There is of course not only bursting with it but guided by it. Dylan’s songs, many of his very best, supply the soundtrack just as they inform the shape and tone and playfully baffling hairpin turns of the story. Just like Chronicles Volume One, Dylan’s recent memoir, the film flows along with the restless, associational, merrily anachronistic funk of Dylan’s verse. Thus each of Haynes’ Dylans appear and reappear throughout, prompting one and other, conspiring toward a strangely coherent narrative thread that’s not at all apparent while we’re in the thick of it.

Early on, Franklin’s Woody, at once a reincarnation and a throwback, is taken to task for singing folk songs tinged with nostalgia for the Depression instead of facing up to the problems of the day. Much later, Gere’s Billy will see flashes of Vietnam in the rolling wooded hills he inhabits like some horseback Unabomber. In between, Blanchett assaults audiences with machine gun rock and fends off journalists with razor sharp witticisms, while, in what for me is the film’s most compelling, beguiling and deeply moving section, Ledger copes with romance, marriage (to a marvelous Charlotte Gainsbourg) and family life while trying to maintain a role in the outside world that may just be coming to define himself. Along the way there are concerts, commentaries (by Julianne Moore as Joan Baez!), cocktail parties, and more than one ominous scene of fumbling with motorcycles.

“You never know how the past will turn out,” is one more gem of a line one of these Dylans tosses off, yet it’s at the heart of Haynes’ stratagems. The caveat in the title of Pennebaker’s classic Dylan doc implies a consequence: if you look back, what lies behind you will change, and the path you’re following will change along with it. I’m Not There looks to and reconfigures the past as a way of discovering ecstatic truths about the culture we share as emblemized by this tremendous individual who means something different to everyone. It’s one hell of a hall of mirrors, and one in which you just might find yourself gazing back.