Hanna

Hanna, 2011 - Joe Wright

This is a great movie, so unlike the other Wright-directed picture I'd seen, Pride And Prejudice (which I admit I love), that it's surprising that it's from the same director. I watched it in a packed theater (which I think is great for a film such as this), and must say that despite this being the first film I'd seen since Tron:Legacy (and we know how much I enjoy that film), this is one of my favorite films of 2011 already. So often I'd felt as if I were watching a gritty '60's spy thriller, like The Ipcress File, or any of the Harry Palmer films, or even The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Ir felt so much like a Cold War thriller that it was exciting (and not in a retro, meta way). This isn't a spy film comprised of other spy films, this is its own entity, and such a beautiful combination of action, story, and style that it really is inspiring for the state of modern action films.

The story starts off near the Arctic Circle, somewhere in northern Russia, where the titular character, Hanna (played perfectly by Saiorse Ronan), an other-worldly-looking blonde 16-year-old girl, has been trained by her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana...why doesn't he get more action leading-man roles? Hulk, as despised as it is, still showed him being amazing at action), a former CIA agent who has been put to ground and is in hiding. They live together, exclusively, and he has trained her in foreign languages (including Arabic, German, French, Italian, and Spanish...at least that's what we hear), physical combat, how to stay aware even in sleep, and how to live in the wold and maneuver on her own. The object of her training is to stay one step ahead of their CIA handler, the icy-cool Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett, with a Southern twang), evade her assassins, and eventually kill her as well. To do that, Erik abandons his daughter, allowing her to to be captured in hopes of reuniting with her in Germany.

With the exception of one plot point (which I won't mention, but when you hear of it you might realize that the movie would have been much more plausible without it), the film is perfect. The Chemical Brothers' score (an energetic, electri-pop) feels more like a complete album of theirs rather than a film score, and with each change in location, Hanna experiences more and more of the emotions that she'd been forced to abandon in her training to become a perfect killing machine. She befriends Sophie (Jessica Barden), who is traveling through Morocco and Spain with her hippy parents and younger brother, and who eventually help her get close enough to Erik to meet up with him in Germany.

However, their friendship is not one grown out of contrivance or for the sake of the plot; here Hanna meets someone her own age, who gets her to experience the first twang of emotion outside of devotion to her father, and whose fate is determined on what she (Hanna) can do. The stakes of the film are determined by how involved Hanna becomes with this traveling family, and that adds gravitas to the action. Each action beat is determined by Hanna's emotions, and by the emotions of the secondary characters (especially Sophie's younger brother, and, in an odd way, Weigler herself). Even the motivations of the Weigler's cronies---the sadistic Isaacs (played in a surprisingly, deliciously perverse way by In The Loop's Tom Hollander)---are driven by some semblance of distorted emotion. Emotions drive this entire film, and that's something that at least feels new coming from an espionage yarn.

That's not to say that the action isn't up to snuff either. Hanna's breakout from a CIA safe-house is incredibly exciting, and cut incredibly well (no montage-style fight scenes, or MTV-style cutting here! No Bourne-style shaky cam! And fuck hand-held! I love it!), bolstered by, once again, the Chemical Brothers' bombastic and energetic score. The highlight of the film is another Joe Wright trademark: a single-take long shot; here, though, we follow Erik Heller as he leaves an airport, gets followed first by one agent, then another, as he makes his way to a metro station, before coming up against no less than 6 agents. In the same shot, he takes them all down swiftly, before walking off. It's beautiful: a single-take tracking shot of a fight scene featuring the protagonist against multiple assailants, showcasing the actor's fighting ability, and shot clearly enough to know what the fuck is going on and who is hitting who. Why is this a rarity in action films? Why should I praise the fact that I can see what the hell is going on?! It should be common sense, especially if it's done as deftly as it is here!

I love this film, not just for the action, or the bad-assness of Hanna herself: this is a smart, thrilling, action-packed espionage fairy tale (yeah...a fairy tale. You'll see what I mean) that is brimming with emotion and subtext (which I would go into more, but it would ruin one of the seminal emotional scenes in the film). With the exception of two minor quibbles (the aforementioned plot point, and the ending, which my friend anticipated almost beat-for-beat), this is a perfect film, and great thriller, and one of the great, smart modern espionage films. If only the modern Bond films were this good...

Also, I couldn't get Isaacs' motif, the one he whistles throughout his appearances, out of my head for days. Now that it's gone, I kind of miss it...

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Being a fan of David Fincher's work, and knowing how often his collaborations with Brad Pitt result in amazing films (such as Se7en and Fight Club), I couldn't help but be excited by his newest film, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. I'd read the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story some time prior to seeing the film, and was expecting something that would be ultimately heartbreaking. Instead, I was extremely unfulfilled with the entire 2-and-a-half hour ordeal.
Granted, the film did have moments of sublime beauty, which I shall relate a bit later. Fincher's eye for detail resulted in some amazingly accurate period set-ups (Apparently Levi's jeans supplied the vintage apparel for the characters in many of the pre-WW2 scenes), and his visual composition was often amazing (Daisy's dance routine in a fog-drenched gazebo was beautiful, as was Benjamin's walkin Moscow with Tilda Swinton's Elizabeth Abbott; the entire U-Boat attack), but the emotional cues were off for me.
Taraji P. Henson's Queenie was the doting mother-figure was the one constant emotional lynchpin to the film, never straying from her adoptive son, but rarely allowing more depth other than to lay words of wisdom on Benjamin, words that sound vaguely similar to writer Eric Roth's former Forrest Gump. Jason Flemyng, as Benjamin's father, Thomas, upon seeing his elderly newborn son, immediately rushes off to get rid of the boy, at first contemplating drowning him befroe dropping him off at the nursing home run by Queenie and her beau. In a film this long and lovingly detailed, Benjamin's origin feels unneccessarily rushed (and no one at all questions the fact that he ages backwards...I know that it's a matter of suspension of disbelief...but no one questions it). Eric Roth wrote a meandering script, one which offered situations without motivation, characters without context, conceits without meaning, and during one sequence, he wrote a five-minute monologue featuring about five characters who never reappear in the story but who exist solely so he could write a meandering description of how a major character was hit by a car. Why not just explain it? Get to the point.
The romantic story between Benjamin and Daisy worked well enough...but for some reason it just didn't click for me. These were two people who, for lack of a better context, met in media res in terms of their lives: Benjamin ages backwards and meets Daisy when she is a small girl and he is (physically) about 85 or so. By the time they're in their mid 30's, its logical for them to finally get together and live out their romantic lives.
But what of it? Sure, stories about people waiting years to be with whom they wish occur to millions of people every single day (hell, I know that feeling from experience), but in a movie the connections should mean something. When Benjamin meets Elizabeth and begins an affair with her in Moscow, he learns about loving. And then...they keep meeting up and having an affair. And she talks about almost swimming across the English Channel. And then...she just kinda leaves the movie. And she doesn't come back until the very very end when we see her, as an elderly lady, having just swum the English Channel. Did she do it because Benjamin inspired her? We don't really seem to know, and by the time she actually did swim across, his story was already over. The emotion wasn't there for me: a character is told for the first time that Benjamin is her father, and we receive about 2 minutes of her coping with that shocking revelation...and then it is never brought up again.
The scenes that held the most emotional weight for me were any featuring Queenie, and every single one featuring Captin Mike, the tattooed tugboat captain who becomes Banjamin's surrogate mentor. His was a presence that stuck with me primarily because it felt real. Capt. Mike is the cynic, the realist, seeing life as it is.When his fate unfolds, it's the only truly poignant moment in the film for me, but even then it's ruined by a CGI hummingbird that appears with little context.
And at the end of the film that's what I felt was missing: context. A point. What's the point in making a character age backwards if little to nothing is done with the conceit, and if none of the characters even really acknowledges the phenomena? Sure, watching Benjamin grow younger and more sharp as he watches those around him grow old and pass on is emotional stuff, but it could be just as emotional if he were to age normally as well.
Normally, Fincher is adept at manipulating emotions without making it ever feel like he is, and even his most heady and meticulous works offer insight to contemporary issues (even his period piece prior to this one, Zodiac). But Benjamin Button just didn't supply the weight I was hoping for after reading the story (not to say the short story was untouchably perfect...far from it. The themes therein are slightly dated, and even Fitzgerald ignores the conceit of a man ageing backwards in the middle section; as a reader of the story but not a disciple of it, I was fine with updating the timeframe and adding to the story). The short story ended with such a heartbreaking conclusion: a man lived a life, fought a war, and loved a woman whom he watched die of old age, and then, as he gets younger and younger, couldn't get the respect from others he'd earned, nor could he even remember his real age, nor his entire life for that matter).
Claudio Miranda's cinemaography, though, was lush and gorgeous; he employed a wide range of earthen tones to create an overly warm enviornment for the story, and the production design for 1920's New Orleans was meticulously detailed. Fincher's flawless design of Benjamin integrated Brad Pitt's likeness seamlessly onto the actors who portrayed the character at various points in history, pushing the visual effects in that regard to its limits (until James Cameron's Avatar premieres), but the special effects during other scenes (most notably the U-boat attack) seemed typical by comparison. In fact, there was a point in the film where Benjamin appears and Brad Pitt is actually younger than he was in Thelma and Louise, his first film. Watching a movie star age in real time over the past twenty years or so becomes so much more complex when you see him as he was and how he is currently within the same film.
This isn't one of Fincher's best films (Panic Room is still my least favorite of his), but it is ambitious. I can give it that much. With a meandering script, a cold-molasses-slow pacing, and an emotional center that doesn't even appear until the third act, it is a chore to sit through. It's not every day a director pushes the limits of his own technical abilities (especially a director as meticulous as Mr. Fincher), but even then the film should have a strong, interesting story. Perhaps it is telling that a film without an interesting story could still be nominated for 12 Oscars.
The concept of the film was interesting enough to get me to the theatre (as well as the inclusion of Mr. Fincher as director), but I still feel it could have been so much more than what the sum of its part gave me. Come for the production design and Brad Pitt face-deageing, but don't expect to be sucked in by the story.

No more hummingbirds. Please.