Film Review | Hanna, dir. Joe Wright

From Pride and Prejudice to Atonement through The Soloist and now this, director Joe Wright's sharp rise to recognition has been a joy to follow. However Hanna marks a major departure for the inextricably literary British filmmaker: from adaptations of the work of Jane Austen and Ian McEwan to this strung-out acid trip of a fairy tale, this latest sees Wright reunited with the stunning young actress he helped bring to prominence only a few years ago, namely rising Irish star Saiorse Ronan, who single-handedly saved Peter Jackson's divisive adaptation of The Lovely Bones from a fate far worse than failure.

The pairing seems to bring out the best in both Wright and Ronan, for though Hanna has its faults - sometimes the disorientation overreaches, and Cate Blanchett's hell-bent CIA agent is a touch too much - nevertheless it should stand as an example of the most aspirational sort to those directors who think the thriller a vehicle for cacophonous action, and mystery and intrigue somehow equal to obfuscation. Here Wright brings his elegant flair to bear on a cracking script featured on the Black List - an annual run-down of the best screenplays in and around Hollywood - not once but twice; in 2006, then again in 2009. Two years on, Hanna has been made at last, and how.

Saiorse Ronan - the eyes of Atonement - is Hanna, a perpetually startled, rabbit-caught-in-headlights kind of girl, and with good reason. Raised in the forest by her father (Eric Bana), and taught to be the perfect assassin, at the outset of Hanna the student finally bests her master - who promptly cuts all ties. Not out of spite, you understand, but because Hanna is finally ready for the confrontation her whole life has been spent in preparation for. And the road before her is one she must walk alone... or not walk at all.

Thus, from out of the forest Hanna comes, to face off against Marissa (Cate Blanchett), a CIA sort who for some undisclosed reason will stop at nothing to see Hanna and her father stopped - permanently. So begins the hunt - a battle of wills foreshadowed in the film's wonderful, winterswept opening moments - and this once, Hanna is not the hunter, but the prey.

Hanna has all the beats and features of an action film, and as an action film, it could very well be the year's best - just the one single-take sequence in the subway (you'll know it when you see it) is enough to put most such movies to shame - but Wright is at least as interested in Hanna's discovery of the world beyond the forest's fringes than in her mad assassin skillz. And credit to him, Hanna is as a narrative not at all overwhelmed by his experiential interests - though as to the girl herself... well. That's a different story.

Different folks will find in Hanna different strokes to adore. For some, the central conflict will seem a cracked yet crystalline thing, no more complex and no less satisfying than: Hanna versus Marissa, round one, fight! Others will gravitate more towards the discomfiting question of Hanna the assassin as opposed to Hanna the person, and Wright wrings much of note from this innocent's grim rite of passage. Hanna's encounter with an American family on holiday, dominated by Dollhouse's Olivia Williams as a new-age matriarch, proves hugely significant: through them she comes into her own, finds that there is more to life than the hunt. There is friendship too, and pleasure, and romance.

And music. "A combination of sounds with a view to beautiform an expression of emotion," as Hanna's father Erik explains early on. Well, exactly. Truly, it would not do to close out this review without taking a moment to applaud The Chemical Brothers for their tremendous soundtrack - their first such; one can only hope not their last. The Chemical Brothers' score is a hypnotic thing, rapturous one moment and haunting the next. It both enriches and embellishes the corrupted beauty that is Hanna's stock in trade, pitch-perfectly capturing the juxtaposition of the scruffy and the elegant which sounds like a beacon throughout the film.

Hanna is a revelatory piece of work from virtually all involved, sprung from Grimm's Fairy Tales via the Eastern Bloc rather than Wright's usual rural England preserves, and though I would not expect it to contribute a single silver dollar to the slew of awards and nominations Joe Wright has behind him, courtesy Jane Austen and Atonement, I couldn't be happier than to see this filmmaker indulge in something a little less literary. And something a damn sight more entertaining for that academic lack.

Book Review: Solar by Ian McEwan

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"Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering.

"But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster."

***

Only a hundred pages into the latest novel from perhaps the greatest living British writer do you begin to grasp the conflict at the core of Solar. As with the vast majority of McEwan's fiction, the narrative turns on a single, earth-shattering event that rips out the rug from under its protagonist. In Solar, the game-changer occurs upon sometime Nobel laureate Michael Beard's return from a week observing first-hand the effects of climate change in the Arctic circle - which is to say, drinking copious quantities of wine and inventing amusing anecdotes to recount at a later date.

Eager for the comforts of hearth and home, Beard returns to London on an early flight only to find one of his research students in his luxurious apartment, naked but for Beard's own dressing gown. The philandering physicist isn't surprised to find his fifth - count 'em - wife with another man, but when Beard confronts the intruder, an already precarious situation develops into a farce of tragic proportions.

Beard is perhaps McEwan's most repellent protagonist to date, and considering the murderers, paedophiles and pimply teenagers who have narrated some of his previous tales, that's saying something. Beard is old, fat and full of himself; he eats, cheats and greets. He is "scalded by public disgrace... corrupted by a whiff of failure [and] consumed by his cranky affair with sunbeams". His inner monologue invariably borders on the unspeakable, by turns racist, lecherous and homophobic.

But Beard's greatest sin is surely his appetite - and I don't merely mean his enduring love for salt and vinegar crisps, though you get the sense that habit alone will see him in an early grave. From the outset, he consumes. He has consumed five wives, the latest of whom outright detests him. He consumes headlines, opinions, science, gossip. In fact, he has made his name in quantum physics by consuming and regurgitating Einstein for his hypothesis, the Beard-Einstein Conflation, earning the Nobel prize that is Beard's only real success by riding on the theoretical coattails of that scientist's breakthroughs. He is a compulsive consumer, and it's a credit to McEwan that Solar remains compelling in spite of its protagonist's unapologetic repugnance.

In large part, that's thanks to the black and brilliantly British sense of humour that pervades the narrative. From the discovery of "an ancient rasher of bacon doubling as a bookmark" between the pages of a valuable first edition to Beard's dreadful scheme to trick his fifth wife into thinking he is entertaining attractive company; and from a packet of salt and vinegar crisps shared (or not quite) on a train ride to an inconvenient call of nature during his weeklong expedition to the Arctic circle, there are frequent moments of dark slapstick more befitting The Mighty Boosh than the latest novel from the great nation's most esteemed author.

The humour is sharp-edged, of course; a fine satirical blade held tightly against the throat of a world procrastinating on its not-quite-fears of climate change. A long and wonderfully cutting lecture Beard gives midway through Solar forms the basis of McEwan's framing of the arguments for and against, but these concerns are not the crux of this novel: Solar doesn't preach in the fashion of Saturday. It is a character study at its heart, a startling triptych of the movements - both literal and metaphorical - of a physically and morally unpleasant man the whims of fate have placed in a position of power. In that, as in its every other purpose, Solar is a tremendous success.

Packed full of observations both sacred and profane and characters who will challenge your understanding of any number of issues, Solar is far from the dry tale of the end-times many feared it might be. Rather, McEwan's novel is an alarming parable of man and movement; the movements man should make, that is, set against those he selfishly does. Shocking, hilarious and unashamedly English, Solar will surely take its place alongside the very best of this breathtaking author's back-catalogue. Let it be said, Ian McEwan is a very clever monkey indeed.

***

Solar

by Ian McEwan

March 2010, Jonathan Cape

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