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.
Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.
Alex Gibney
Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.
Danny Boyle
Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.
I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.
Guy Maddin
I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”
