HANNA - visually brilliant - narratively nonsensical

HANNA is a visually stylish; brilliantly edited; powerfully orchestrated action movie let down by inconsistent acting styles; insufficiently developed themes; and a story full of plot holes so large you could drive a horse and carriage through them.


Let's start with the bad. HANNA is a story that simply collapses on its own lack of logic. Papa (Eric Bana) wants to keep Hanna (Saiorse Ronan) safe from evil CIA meanie, Marissa (Cate Blanchett).  Lesser-trained peeps might think to hide in plain sight in a major metropolis, camouflaged by banality.  But no, ex-CIA tough guy, Papa, decides to keep Hanna in a wintery forest, training herto be a bad-ass assassin, Kick-Girl-stylee, and then, allowing her to press a transponder button that immediately alerts the CIA to her presence!  And even then, rather that travel to some safe little town Papa and Hanna engineer a confrontation in Berlin because, hey, without that, there wouldn't be a film.  The CIA are similarly idiotic. For those who have seen the film, I simply ask why Marissa didn't run after Erik and the baby after the car accident and end proceedings right there?  


Still, let's say we go with this absurd plot and willingly suspend our disbelief, the movie doesn't help by consistently undermining the credibility and authenticity it's so desperately trying to create. (And I'm not just talking about idiot goofs like showing that Hanna's ears have been pierced).  The big problem is inconsistent acting styles. 


Ronan does a good job in trying to convey what it must be like for an isolated child to suddenly be part of the modern world, with its incessant babbling.  Director Joe Wright, together with his DP Alwin Kuchler, and his editor, Paul Tothill, do a stand-up job of depicting sensory overload.  I also loved Hanna's tentative first friendship with a teenage camper, played by the scene-stealing Jessica Barden (TAMARA DREWE).  There is a real sense of intimacy and authenticity - in particular, I loved the scene in the tent - it was intimate but never felt voyeuristic or exploitative.  I also really loved Hanna's reaction to seeing a real family interact for the first time - her simple smile at seeing a mother and father hugging a child. I completely disagree with reviewers and commentators who say that the film loses pace at this point.  After all, this is not just an action film but a character-driven film - and Hanna's response to the family moves this film beyond KICK-ASS and into some altogether more interesting territory.


The problem is that all this good character-work is completely undermined by Cate Blanchett's hammy performance as the CIA agent, Marissa.  Blanchett's Marissa isn't so much a fully developed character as a colour-coded compendium of caricatured evil: posion-green Prada shoes, bright orange ill-fitting fright-wig and ever-shifting Southern accent (as if, in this post-Osama world, the worst thing you can sound like is a Southern Republican).  It was almost as much of an embarrassment as the throw-back costume design of Tom Hollander's sleazy German night-club owner and his skin-head Droogs - as if A Clockwork Orange had been crossed with Smiley's People.  


I suspect the problem was that Joe Wright was trying to explore the fairytale themes in the story - Hanna as a little red riding hood in a cottage in the woods and Marissa as a kind of evil step-mother figure and/or the big bad wolf.  The cottage in Berlin is out of Hansel and Gretel...  These themes are suggested in the visuals - costumes, colour choices, and even more explicitly in the final scene between Marissa and Hanna. But, those themes are obstructions to credibility and are never fully developed.  I think that's why, when I finally left the cinema, I felt I had been given a taste of something deeper, something clever, but that the film hadn't followed through.   


Still for all those criticisms, and the final sense of disappointment, I really did enjoy watching HANNA and I think it's definitely worth the price of admission for the brilliantly choreographed and scored action sequences and the friendship scenes between Ronan and Barden. Joe Wright needs to make a flick that either pure character-driven action - like BOURNE - or pure character. He needs to stay focussed and pick a script that hasn't been worked over so much that it becomes a mass of contradictions and poorly developed themes.

HANNA is on release in Aruba, Greece, Hong Kong, Canada, the US, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Iceland, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and the UK. It opens on May 11th in Belgium, on May 13th in Italy and on May 26th in Germany and Switzerland. It opens on June 9th in France, Argentina, Estonia, Spain and Turkey. It opens on June 16th in Hungary, on June 23rd in Portugal, and on July 7th in Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway. It opens on July 21st in Singapore, on August 27th in Japan and on September 1st in Australia and New Zealand.

Overlooked DVD of the month - MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX is an amazing film, and all the more wonderful for being un-expectedly so. It's a darkly comic, emotionally raw clay-animated drama about the unlikely friendship between two very lonely people - a little girl called Mary, who lives in Australia, and an old man called Max, who lives in New York. Mary Daisy Dinkle is lonely because her mum is a mean drunk and her father is a withdrawn taxidermist. She hates how she looks, she's socially awkward and other kids tease her. Max is lonely because he finds the world strange and irrational and frustrating and retreats into a closed existence of comfort-eating and writing angry letters. They are each other's only and best friends. 

The movie takes us from the early heady days of their friendship - the first not to involve an imaginary friend for both of them - through Mary's adolescence and marriage. The friendship blossoms, then flounders on betrayal, and is finally redeemed. The journey is genuinely moving - I cried like a baby at the end of the film - and I was happy to have spent time with these intriguing people despite the harsh material I was forced to endure - drug abuse, sexual infidelity, self-loathing, suicide and chronic disease. 

If all this makes MARY AND MAX sound about as much fun as shock-therapy, then please believe me that despite the unbearable sadness as its heart, it's also a very funny, and ultimately uplifting film. The detail of the art design is wonderfully witty, with lots of clever details to repay a repeat viewing, and the verbal humour is at once pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny. I have always had nothing but praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he really surpasses himself as Max, imbuing every sentence with common-sense, hurt, longing, fear and unintentional wit. Toni Colette is wonderfully misguided and sympathetic as Mary, and even Eric Bana gives a sweet cameo. So, if you love the kind of gentle, warm, heart-breaking humour found in the following quotations, please check MAX AND MARY out. As for me, I just can't wait to see what Australian writer-director Adam Eliot does next.

Max Jerry Horovitz: When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads. 

Max Jerry Horovitz: Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent. 

MARY AND MAX played Sundance and Berlin 2009 and opened in Australia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Russia that year. It opened last year in Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the UK. It is currently on release in Singapore and opens in Japan on April 23rd. It is available to rent and own.

FUNNY PEOPLE - We hate it when our friends become successful

FUNNY PEOPLE is multi-hyphenated film-maker, Judd Apatow's, attempt to move from frat-boy comedy to auteur status. It's not enough that he's written, produced or directed almost every successful Hollywood comedy of the past few years. He wants respect for something other than telling dick jokes and raking in the proverbial phat cash. In order to do this, he has made a self-referential movie about how success corrupts and ultimately does not satisfy, illustrating this with the relationship between Adam Sandler's successful Hollywood funny-man and Seth Rogen's aspiring stand-up comedian. Sandler's character treats women like shit, has no friends, has lost the love of his life by cheating on her and has lost the joy in writing comedy. When diagnosed with terminal illness he basically pays Seth Rogen's character to be his friend. And even Rogen's character, who is meant to be the moral compass of the film, back-stabs his room-mate to get the gig. And what of life in the real world? The "one who got away" is ready to trade in her husband and kids for a narcissistic dream of young love and a revitalised career. And even her husband is an arrogant schmuck. I mean, when you break it down, there aren't any pleasant characters in this movie. There's no one to root for, and no real self-discovery or improvement. Fundamentally, everyone is self-involved. And that isn't funny. It's depressing.

Granted, there are a lot of jokes in the film, and I did laugh a lot. Most of the humour was fairly lazy - the typical dick and wank jokes. The skits that really landed a punch were typically not the classic Apatow jokes - the German doctor was funny, as was Eminem in pure dead-pan satire. But there was way too much self-indulgent fluff involving Apatow gathering comedians he likes on screen and generally just schmoozing. You can see where the guy who had kids breakdown the narrative structure and comic breaks in STRIPES and THE JERK in FREAKS AND GEEKS would get off on this sort of fan-fic. But, as they say, there is nothing more boring then listening to someone else describe their dreams.

I was disappointed not to see a more savage breakdown of the Sandler-Hollywood-superstar persona. I've always found there to be something slightly sinister about Sandler's humour. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE exploited that brilliantly. FUNNY PEOPLE doesn't really have the balls to try. On a more prosaic note, I thought the second half of the film, with the Star trying to break a marriage, was over-long, drifted and needed drastic editing down. Note to Judd Apatow - it is possible make a classic comedy that's 90 minutes long.

FUNNY PEOPLE was released in July in the US, Kazakhstan, Russia and Canada. It was released earlier in August in Egypt and Mexico. It opens in the UK on August 28th. It opens in September in the Netherlands, Iceland, Spain, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Singapore and Romania. It opens in October in Greece, Estonia, Turkey, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It opens on November 26th in Argentina and on December 3rd in Hungary.

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE – Intelligent, Romantic, Tragic

I liked the TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE. It made me cry, and not in a way that made me feel violated and manipulated like TITANIC or DEVDAS. And it made me think, not only about the causal paradoxes that are inherent to time-travel movies – but also about the unique ethical dilemmas the plot brings up.

Ultimately though, the best thing about TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE is that it doesn’t rotate around the science-fiction aspect of time travel, or about any of the ethical issues it raises – it’s just a good, old-fashioned love story: soft; kind; tragic. The time travel is an interesting twist – it makes a more complex and thought provoking plot possible – it means that, unlike other romances, you can still be thinking about it the day after.

I’ve never read the book, and it’s possible that it doesn’t do it justice, few films do. I would certainly have liked some of the issues explored further. Was the relationship genuinely fidelitous around the conception of the couple’s child? Was the hero’s decision prior to that conception justified? Was the hero cruel or kind at the end? I would imagine the book looks at these in some more detail.

But I’m nitpicking. Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams are convincing in the main roles – the movie is well shot and directed – the screenplay has appropriate depth and feeling. It was funny, happy, sad and thought provoking – and while it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea (I can see young male action-movie-fans balking at this one) - it proved an excellent couples movie and a poignant way of spending an afternoon with Mrs Plainview.

Fundamentally a solid, intelligent romantic drama: highly recommended to all fans of the genre.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines and Mexico. It opens in September in Greece, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Germany, Argentina, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It opens in October in Sweden, Russia and Estonia. It opens in November in Australia, Italy and France. It opens in December in New Zealand and on February 25th 2010 in Portugal.