Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett's gums
Year: 2011
Bumper: Ryan Wilson
So I teach this seminar course to sophomores in high school. It's about navigating the thorny teenage American information soaked life, making good decisions, that sort of thing. Some days I do a pretty good job, and the kids earnestly think about some issue and opine passionately. Others I stand up there and yap at them for 45 minutes, then descend to the cafeteria to buy a chocolate muffin to counteract the feeling of failure. The ratio of good/bad days is pretty much equal to the ratio of my good/bad decisions in real life.
One of the topics we cover is Gender. We talk about stereotypes, some very light neuroscience, media portrayals of masculinity and femininity--and most of the kids pretty much hate it. Or, perhaps more likely, hate me for bringing it up and making a big deal about it. It makes them feel bad for being duped all the time, subscribing to the tropes that get rolled out over and over again by advertisers, TV shows and movies that are really just extended commercials. Most of the kids like their ads and stereotype reinforcing TV, thank you very much, you leftist, anti-capitalist, broke-ass, Utopian fool--what kind of car do you drive? A station wagon? Exactly. Fair enough--masculinity is hard to wrap your parts around at sixteen. Expanding the definition to include things other than football, money, and hyper-heterosexuality just makes things muddy. Black and White! Cut and Dried! Callous and Macho! Still, it's my job, guys.
But the girls are in a different and even trickier spot. The somewhat recent addition to the trash heap of shallow female cliches is "Action Hero Fuck Toy," you know what I'm talking about. I don't go see these movies, but here's a list made by some geek that demonstrates the effect: 10 Hottest Action Figures on the Market.
The woman seems to be a bad-ass killah, thus empowered, uttering double entendre catch phrases that promise sex and death as one ecstatic, hollow, ejaculatory moment in time. You know, like porn. About the only movies to counter this have been animated and imported from Japan (Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind). Perhaps Kill Bill. Perhaps.
Enter Hanna. For those of us who can't even engage action movies without receiving at least a bone thrown to character, here it is, rolled up and sealed in a helluva sparkly/grizzly package. This movie is a gender bending thrill-fest. We've got super-assassin and woodsman, Eric Bana, as nurturer. Maniacally bleach-smiled, bloody gummed, high heeled Cate Blanchett as state sponsored killer. Oh, and the ultimate! The whistling German short-shorts wearing mercenary with a swoop of artificially blonde hair, fixing his sadistic eyes with equal intensity upon his victims and some poor hermaphrodite performing some kind of fairy-tale mime show in a bar. I haven't even gotten to the protagonist yet! Hanna is that rare movie animal that is divinely gorgeous, and yet somehow manages to avoid being cheaply objectified. The movie never lingers on anything implying sexuality when it comes to its heroine. Instead, it opts for silent close-ups of her tractor-beam face that reveal her complex mental state. She was born to be a killer--and killer she is. Fuck Toy, she is not.
Somehow, Joe Wright achieves something close to unthinkable. He makes all of this plausible while piling on the psychedelic imagery and weaving in a great Chemical Bros. score. This, friends, is real bad-ass action.
