I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Upon its release, I'm Not There struck me as a hollow experiment, a nifty "what-if" but nothing more. Not helping matters, certainly, was my own lack of familiarity with Bob Dylan, a sacred cow whose enigmatic profile (as evidenced by this fragmentary "biopic") split into so many personalities that I never knew how to approach him. For all its dazzling formal techniques, I'm Not There frustrated me for doing nothing, it seemed, to explore Dylan's real personality. Its much-ballyhooed division of Dylan's various artistic reinventions into separate roles for different actors was its greatest weakness.

Of course, Bob Dylan's refusal to be defined as any one thing but Bob Dylan (and sometimes not even that), is what has made him endure as much as a mystery as a legend. Haynes does not attempt to "solve" Dylan, and if I'm Not There ultimately concludes that there may be no real Dylan under all those smokescreens, it nevertheless paints a compelling portrait—well, collage—of a man who exists wholly within pop culture. The trait that links the six characters representing Dylan's personae is a hint of persecution by those who love him, of devotion and mistrust displayed in equal measure. Even the earliest incarnation of Dylan, a mere child faces hardship, even if he has to invent some of it.

That child (Marcus Carl Franklin), who calls himself Woody Guthrie represents Dylan's beginnings as an ambitious folkie who drifted out of the Midwest as if a dissatisfied spirit of the Depression spat him out at the turn of the '60s. But by casting an African-American as the boy, Haynes begins a subtle but consistent critique of Dylan's public image wrapped up in the loving tribute. Woody spins all kinds of tall tales as a backstory to the families and hobos he meets riding the rails across the country, stories that appropriate misery and strife to make his life more compelling. Yet the child actor's race is the biggest appropriation of all, the artist who would become the ultimate in white liberal hipness seeing himself as a poor black kid at heart in a too-forward sense of identification with the truly downtrodden.

Yet the leap from this child, introduced circa 1959, to actors pushing 30, if not already past the line, could be seen as a respectful view of the artist's rapid maturity. Christian Bale takes the baton from Franklin to play Jack Rollins, the Dylan who erupted in Greenwich Village as the superstar of the '60s folk scene. The difference between the two characters is as vast as the gulf between Dylan's self-titled debut, filled mostly with passable covers of folk standards and his sophomore effort, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, such an instant, out-of-nowhere classic many still believe it is his true first album. Franklin's Woody, naïve and romanticizing the past, is the only character younger than Dylan was in each respective career phase, but Bale emerges a man of the moment, crystallizing the social ills of the day rather than hiding out in the past. Even so, Dylan is still a young man, barely over 20 when he becomes a cause célèbre and not yet 25 when he sends shockwaves through his devoted fanbase. He may have the voice of a man who has lived lifetimes, but he is still barely an adult.

Nowhere is this blend of maturity and youth more strikingly displayed than in Cate Blanchett's performance as Dylan's "going electric" avatar, Jude Quinn. This period of Dylan's life has been documented more than any other, a fact Haynes does not even attempt to hide as his grainy black-and-white stock and verité style recalls D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. That film showed off a combative, evasive boy sneering at the press (and fans) who hung on his every word. Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, looks at that same material from a retrospective angle, clarifying Dylan's seeming aggressiveness as the result of his unwillingness to be the voice of a generation, with all the baggage that would bring.

Not even the real Dylan, however, brings as much sobering insight into his younger self's belligerence as Blanchett. The actress' agelessness here serves as a trap for Jude. Wearing Dylan's black sunglasses, Blanchett plays Jude as peevish and vulgar, being outlandish just to get a rise out of those who feel he owes them something. But Blanchett's jittery leg twitching and head jerking suggest amphetamine addiction. The illicit substance keeps Jude going through his concentrated period of artistic fertility; the three album stretch Jude personifies is perhaps the most radical evolution of pop songcraft of the 20th century. It also leaves Jude strung out and nervous, his already apparent discomfort with superstardom exacerbated by a lack of sleep and an overstimulated brain. Jude takes off his glasses regularly, but one shot in particular, situated at the film's end, holds on Blanchett's face as she looks with uncovered eyes into the camera, lines practically forming around her eyes as her deflated, neutral facial expression communicates an endless weariness. It is ravaging enough to be either Jesus or Judas. Dylan at this time was both, and as Blanchett's Jude ages in that late shot, the motorcycle crash that Dylan fans know is right around the corner could almost been seen as a deliverance.

Blanchett owns much of the film in terms of screen time and presence, but the lesser-seen personalities contain their own insights, affections and critiques of the subject. Ben Whishaw appears as the poet side of Dylan, on trial by an unseen prosecutor that could be jilted radicals as easily as the Establishment. Richard Gere, playing Billy the Kid in a reference to Dylan's involvement with Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, shows Dylan in exile after his crash. The real Kid died at 21, but Gere recalls the 36-year-old Kris Kristofferson of Peckinpah's film, not a boy who lived fast and died young but a weathered and withered vision of a dying symbol. The child Woody made out like he had the weight of the world on his shoulder. Blanchett's Jude didn't have to pretend, and Gere's Billy still smarts decades later from all that pressure.

I'm Not There contains its share of in-jokes and references. Haynes employs overt Hard Day's Night quotations when Jude meets the Beatles, and the funniest joke of the movie involves Jude introducing Brian Jones of the Stones as being "from that groovy covers band." Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) takes the film's metatextual elements to a new level as an actor who plays Jack Rollins and becomes a Dylanesque figure himself (he even marries the equivalent of Sarah Dylan, with whom he casually recreates the cover for Freewheelin'). These might be considered part of the typical pandering biopics do for fans, but then, the whole film requires a working understanding of Dylan's work and life from his early days through at least the '66 crash and a few scattered bits after that. The opening credits, played over shots of the outcasts of the world—complete with high-contrast, finely detailed images of coal-faced workers that recalls Gregg Toland's cinematography for The Grapes of Wrath—is clearly meant to evoke "Desolation Row." Unless, of course, you haven't heard that song, in which case the whole credits will be confusing. And the sly recasting of Bale's Jack Rollins, seen as a prophet to '60s radicals, as Dylan's Born Again avatar is a wry joke, for those who get it.

But perhaps this is how biopics of legends should operate, diving into the esoterica and letting those who have no familiarity with the artist—like my 18-year-old self—be left out in the cold. Why, after all, should the millions who love Dylan (or Cash, or Ray) and thirst for a real insight into the artist be forced to sit through a feature-length "greatest hits" for the sake of the clueless? Even if Haynes reinforces the notion of Dylan as fundamentally unknowable, his evocative, obscure shots and scenes say more about the artist than a host of documentaries and books. Case in point: Bruce Greenwood appears during the Jude section as a hostile journalist who hectors the artist for his immaturity. Greenwood is old enough to be the Establishment, his dismissal that of the older crowd who never understood why kids bothered with this guy anyway. Yet the actor returns for Billy's segment to play Pat Garrett, forced to confront the Kid one last time having failed to kill him in this universe. As Garrett stares into Billy's eyes, though, Haynes flashes back across characters as Mr. Jones harangues Jude, ignoring the young man's instability to attack its childish manifestations. Greenwood's Garrett feels the remorse of that memory; he did not kill the Kid here, but he did in a past life. This subtle connection says more about artistic martyrdom, misunderstanding and critical reevaluation than all the talking heads in the world.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there is at least some kind of push to make the movie distinct from its predecessors. Where the first three films paid homage to serials of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Crystal Skull accounts for the 19-year gap between between this fourth installment in the franchise and 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by shifting its inspirations accordingly.

Here, the root inspiration is ‘50s-era science fiction (and its attendant Cold War subtext), which, in a way, makes the film unique, at least in relation to the other Indy movies. Instead of relics with supernatural might, the treasured objects of the film’s title are mysterious, perfectly formed skulls with strange powers, powers not of brute strength but of mental manipulation. In keeping with anti-Communist paranoia, the weapon here is the power to brainwash without fail. It’s a clever twist that didn’t get enough credit upon the film’s initial release; the only critic I can recall even mentioning it was, of all people, routine Spielberg-basher Jonathan Rosenbaum.

The film opens not with the usual bombastic, audience-grabbing stunt but with a light-hearted, rock ‘n roll-themed drag race between soldiers headed for a military base and a car filled with high school greasers and girls. The same Western expanses Indy rode through on a horse and train as a young adult now sport the freshly paved lanes of Eisenhower’s interstate system. And when the race ends and the military convoy arrives outside Area 51, Spielberg switches over to Cold War invasion terror when the soldiers turn out to be Commies in disguise, looking for deadly secrets to use against America. It’s a low-key opening for the franchise, but one that displays a refreshing willingness to grow and change. It scarcely feels like an Indiana Jones film at all, an intriguing change of pace that shows off the director’s playfulness.

And then Indy shows up. The second our archaeologist hero is heaved from a car trunk, the sheer force of his iconography commandeers the film. Spielberg only exacerbates Ford’s enduring charisma, ironically, by not showing him immediately. He instead introduces Indy by his synecdochical item of clothing, his fedora, then through a silhouette on a car door. By the time the camera twirls around to capture Ford’s aged but still grizzled face, the director has more or less served the role of James Brown’s announcer, whipping the crowd into a frenzy before throwing over to the main event. By introducing Indy through his shadow, though, Spielberg inadvertently suggests that he is a Nosferatu-like monster, come to steal away a potentially interesting, individual effort and make into the usual tat.

Indeed, Indy’s appearance marks the start of a gradual downturn in quality that lasts the entire film, sapping the initial burst of energy and creativity until Crystal Skull ultimately morphs into a pandering, listless sequel that fails to capitalize upon its ideas. It starts early: forced by the Russians to help them find an alien carcass that holds the key to their plans, Indy of course ends up in a huge chase to escape, a genuinely impressive stunt that shows Ford’s willingness to still do at least some of his own stunt work. But as he careens around the vast warehouse slamming into objects in a military transport vehicle, the camera stays behind one mangled box to reveal the Ark of the Covenant, hidden at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a trite moment, one that breaks the spell momentarily cast by the sequence and serves only to placate an audience assumed to be getting bored already.

The rest of the film generally plunders past installments for inspiration. The wry father-son dynamic of Last Crusade, as much a parody of Spielberg’s pet theme as one of its finest presentations, is presented in inverse. Now Indiana is the absent, crotchety father, made to contend with the sudden appearance of a son he did not know he had. And just as Indy’s impetuousness and hands-on approach to archaeology caused conflicts with his studious dad, so too does Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) represent everything Indiana hates. But where the rift between Indy and Henry Sr. played out almost as a professional and personal rivalry, making them brilliant comic and action foils, Mutt’s juxtaposition is simpler. Stacked against Indy’s encyclopedic knowledge and lifetime of academia, Mutt is a greaser dropout whose flits of archaeological know-how seem less deepening personality quirks than necessary add-ons to ensure he’s not total dead weight.

Because of this facile contrast, based in the easy humor of poking Indy for his age, Ford and LaBeouf display none of the chemistry that made Ford and Connery one of the best father-son pairings in film. LaBeouf’s attempts at swagger come off as hollow arrogance, and he lacks the presence to hold his own against Ford’s laconic put-downs. Part of this isn’t LaBeouf’s fault: the spiky energy between Ford and Connery came from an entire history Indy and his father shared off-screen. Thrust upon Doctor Jones as the son he did not know he had, Mutt is as unfamiliar to the hero as he is to the audience. Mutt feels more like Short Round than he does a son. But at least Short Round had comic timing; LaBeouf’s awkward posturing communicates none of the rebellious cool of all the ‘50s teen heroes he studied for the role. Not even Spielberg can make him a striking figure, framing the boy’s introduction through mist at a train station but making his sudden appearance instantly dull and extraneous. The camera immediately picks up on what the script did not: this character does not belong.

As the film presents Mutt as Indy’s son, it must also bring out the boy’s mother, leading to the return of Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). Probably the most beloved character in the franchise besides Indy himself, Marion should be a welcome sight, and she even avoids the damsel pitfall into which she fell in Raiders’ second half. But there’s something off about her from the moment she appears, a strange look in Allen’s face that suggests she’s so happy to be included that she might break at any moment, turn to the camera and thank Spielberg just for letting her be a part of this wonderful project. It obliterates the edge she gave Marion back in 1981, making her look about as vacant and loopy as John Hurt as a professor driven mad by the strange, thrumming energy of the crystal skulls (vaguely recalling Roy’s obsessive, alien-tweaked behavior in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Of course, crowds flock to see Indiana Jones movies not for depth of character but for the quality of the stunts. Unfortunately, the tactile quality of the old film’s sequences has been swapped for vast, empty CGI that utterly drains Crystal Skull of the suspense and thrill of its predecessors. When the Russians open the warehouse doors at the beginning, Spielberg cuts to an extreme long shot that swoops about as the outsized enormity of the place is illuminated by truck headlights that burn as large and bright as twin suns. It shows off Spielberg’s bombast, but it lacks feeling. Compare this master shot of the warehouse to the one that closes Raiders: that film used its own trickery to make its warehouse seemingly endless, employing a matte painting that creates the illusion of a storage facility that stretches into the vanishing point. Nevertheless, even the old methods of fakery have a texture to them that the too-slick computer animation here lacks.

(That the CGI is so sloppy in Crystal Skull is surprising given the typical level of quality of computer-animated effects in Spielberg’s film, from the landmark, still-gorgeous dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to the finely detailed, artfully odd designs of War of the Worlds. Compare the undated quality of the effects of those films with a scene here of ants swarming a particularly bullish Russian soldier who serves as primary henchman. Granted, CGI faces are always hard to pull off, but try not to laugh at the utterly pedestrian quality of this shot, which looks as if it had been animated in the mid-‘90s, not four years ago.)

The most famous example of the overinflated, stake-less action is, of course, the “nuking the fridge” scene. The moment of total disconnect from the movie when I first saw it, this sequence no longer bothers me as it did. There’s no denying that the sight of Indy surviving a nuclear explosion by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator is exceedingly stupid, the sort of thing that is clearly meant to be a gag but is then played too straight to work as a joke. But the mock suburb targeted for the test strike is admittedly funny, Spielberg and Kaminski lightening the frame to capture the treacly, bubblegum view of ‘50s middle-class comfort shortly before it is obliterated by the military-industrial complex that constructed that illusion. And though the sight of the Indy-filled fridge soaring through the air and slamming into the ground with enough force to liquefy the old man is too stupid to bear, the ending shot of Indy looking up at the mushroom cloud sucking up dust to blot out the sun is as surreal and hauntingly beautiful as anything in War of the Worlds.

For me, the more garish sequence is the epically disastrous centerpiece in the Amazon. With both Indy’s band and the Russians hunting for El Dorado, Spielberg collides the two in an extended sequence that awkwardly mashes up several distinct setpieces into one clumsy whole. The action moves from a truck containing Indy, Marion and Mutt as prisoners to their eventual escape and takeover of that vehicle and others, moves into a sword fight held across two cars, an Aguirre-esque rain of monkeys, the aforementioned bit with the ants and, finally, a trip in an amphibian vehicle down not one, but three waterfalls.

In many ways, this sequence recalls the similarly epic Bagghar sequence from last year’s The Adventures of Tintin. That film’s centerpiece was a masterpiece of mise-en-scène, an unbroken animated shot that kept piling on information into the frame until it threatened to collapse under the strain. But here, Spielberg’s direction lacks any flow; the monkeys, bullet ants and waterfalls do not clearly occupy the same space, not in the way that everything in Bagghar somehow makes sense. When Mutt gets sucked up into the tree canopies an finds the monkeys, it’s as if he’s gone to another place entirely. The same is true of the sudden appearance of the ant mounds, or the almost inevitable waterfalls.

I know some who pardon this sequence, arguing that it is meant to be taken in light jest, but the previous Indiana Jones films all achieved a lighthearted, effervescent energy in their stunts without completely tossing out the tension or a loopy verisimilitude. Can I believe natives hundreds of years ago carved a perfectly spherical boulder and somehow hoisted it into a booby trap that can detect a difference in weight seemingly by the ounce? No, but I can buy it at the start of Raiders because the direction is so exhilarating and the layout of the tomb so clear simply from a few glances. This sequence holds no weight at all, and it’s more visually incoherent than Spielberg’s handheld camerawork.

The only setpiece that really works is the nighttime grave-robbing scene where Indy and Mutt discover a crystal skull of their own. That the scene works at all is somewhat to the film’s detriment, as it is the sequence that most resembles (or rips off) the other movies in the franchise. Like similar sequences in the other films, this is a bridging moment, with Indy wallowing around some grimy, dark place looking for the next piece of the puzzle. This scene lacks the same icky factor of the rat- and bug-infested catacombs of past efforts, but the surreal slapstick of natives diving in and out of holes to torment Indy and Mutt is the only time the comedic approach to the stunts is genuinely funny and not out-of-place. Granted, it resembles a Scooby Doo episode more than an Indiana Jones setpiece, but I’ll take what I can get with this movie. I'm also fond of the effect of an immaculately preserved body vaporizing upon contact with oxygen, a delightfully gruesome aside.

I have not yet mentioned the film’s primary antagonist, Irina Spalko, played with spiky dispassion and an inconsistent accent by Cate Blanchett. Like other villains of the series, Spalko is the avaricious foil to Jones’ prosocial motives for finding artifacts. If anything, she may be the purest contrast for the hero yet, her thirst for power taking the form of a Faustian hunt for ultimate knowledge that is not too different from Jones’ quests of secular enlightenment. Blanchett’s pristine beauty makes her a striking villain aesthetically, but she combines the least memorable aspects of Indy baddies and female characters into one empty shell of a character. The problem also is that the villains in Indiana Jones movies are typically just stand-ins for a larger evil force that can be despised: ask someone who the bad guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you’ll probably hear “Nazis” instead of “Belloq” or “Toht.” Commies don’t hold the same lingering allure/repulsion that Nazis do, further draining Spalko of her thin presence.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends with some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about inter-dimensional beings and a hideously animated maelstrom of a flying saucer taking off, but its worst image may be its last, of the literal riding into the sunset of Last Crusade replaced by a perfunctory wedding. Like other aspects of the movie, this coda is intended to show Indy coming to terms with his age. But for a movie that tries so hard to argue that the old guy’s still got it, these concessions to maturation seem no more than light gags, instead of the criticism they might have been. Crystal Skull’s acknowledgement of its hero’s age might have been a comment on all heroes and how they do not remain frozen in their youthful triumph. That it is instead a lazy, vaudevillian throwaway only compounds the potential wasted on a return to one of the most popular film franchises in history.

Hanna

In the wake of the dismal, thoroughly chauvinistic takes on female empowerment seen in Kick-Ass and Sucker Punch, along comes Joe Wright to save us. He does not try to pass off the idea of a young woman given a homeschooling from hell as some sort of joke (except perhaps on a cosmic level), nor does he present the violence as something cool. After a certain point, it's difficult even to chuckle uncomfortably at Hanna's bloodbaths, and Wright manages to keep his PG-13 rating by hiding most of the red stuff through cutaways to the horrified faces of spectators to this teenager's rampage.

I've not been the world's biggest Wright fan in the past, always feeling that he chose serious topics or literature to adapt and then made it all about him and his (admittedly considerable) camerawork. Here, divested of the need to honor a book or a person's life, he lets his style float freely, and the ride is wild indeed. Hanna strikes me at once as both continuation and antidote to last year's The American: like that film, Wright's movie messes with staid genre conventions of the trained killer. Unlike The American, this movie is balls-to-the-wall frenzy. And yet, a hand guides this ship through the maelstrom, and even when Wright's style dips into shaky cam and music video editing, he puts enough spin on these tropes to break them free from cliché's gravity.

For all the visual tricks Wright employs, the most prominent aspect in Hanna is the sound design. The titular protagonist (Saoirse Ronan), a young girl secreted away by her father (Eric Bana) to a remote Arctic forest and trained in various methods of killing, knows how to study each situation, and the initial enhancement of the sound effects reflects her alert senses. Later, when she joins the real world to help in her father's convoluted scheme for revenge against the CIA, Wright employs the same heightened sound levels to communicate how bewildered she is by everyday items like electricity. Tellingly, even an Arabic hotel with flickering fluorescent lights and a crap TV that only gets a handful of channels scares her as if she were just thawed from a glacier after thousands of years.

Through these clever touches, Wright manages to convey a surprising depth in a girl with limited personality as a result of her sheltered, focused upbringing. She can look at a gun pointed at her and feel no fear, but when confronted with technology she did not know existed or a human being who can think about something else besides killing and torture. The scars her trainer left on her can be seen better in these moments than the somewhat on-the-nose verbalization of the same hangups late in the film.

Assigning all the credit to Wright, however, would ignore the astonishing lead performance given by Ronan, who worked with the director on Atonement, where she was the best and worst thing about the movie because she so perfectly captured Briony that I had to look away in seething hatred whenever she was on-screen. Ronan, now 16 (well, 17 today -- happy birthday, Saoirse!), is now taller and lankier, as if someone took her frame and simply stretched it out. Yet you can see the strength in her body; like De Niro in Taxi Driver, she may be small, but she's wiry, all unbreakable tendons waiting to release pent-up energy on the first person to underestimate her.

In her cold blue eyes is both tenderness and fury. Details leaks every so often about what makes Hanna "special," but the look her in eyes suggests the nurture argument over nature. The British family that takes Hanna in is disarmed by her; she's naïve and those wide blue eyes counter all of her talk of independence and her stated desire to be alone to avoid trouble. People tend to trust someone with blue eyes (trust me), but one would do well to remember that the blue part of a flame is always the hottest, and when Ronan's eyes narrow you know something bad is about to happen.

Also getting the chance to be fiendishly wicked and unexpectedly unsettling is Cate Blanchett. After suffering through her thankless role in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, a part defined entirely by a wig and bad accent, Blanchett finally gets to stretch her sinister muscles as CIA agent Marissa Wiegler, who plays like a mashup of Condi Rice, Hillary Clinton and Bush himself. With her high cheekbones and soft lips, Blanchett normally looks like the most villainous thing she could do would be to scheme her way through a Victorian party, but here she displays a remarkable ability for facial control. Blanchett subtly pulls back her lips in a permanent sneer, tightening her face and accentuating her most prominent facial features in an inexplicably garish light. She sets her lip quivering so well it looks involuntary, and her occasional losses of self-control suggest a connection with Eric and Hanna that runs deeper than the story we're given.

Like the best stylish thrillers, Hanna features such seemingly throwaway moments to offer tantalizing teases of unspoken quirks and traits. Marissa caries around a dentist's arsenal of tooth-cleaning tools with her, and in a close-up we see her brushing so vigorously that her gums bleed. The British parents (Jason Flemyng and Olivia Williams) who let Hanna tag along with their children manage to be both uptight and New Age, and all their overbearing fretting over the proper way to raise children who clearly aren't better off for the attention gives way to a shot of their campy rigorously rocking as they do what couples do on vacation.

And then, there's the action. Wright employs both shaky cam and music video editing at times, but Wright appears to be venting his excess skill on a lark; Hanna ranks with After Hours as one of the great modern examples of a supremely talented filmmaker just having fun. Warped angles, funhouse-mirror matching cuts, replays, shifting color patterns and a few setpieces that border on the Expressionist combine into an orgy of flair, all of it propelled by alternating blast of silence and a wonderful score by the Chemical Brothers. Not as masterful as last year's big electronic winner, the Social Network soundtrack, the Chemical Brothers' soundscapes are nevertheless a delight and fit perfectly with the movie. It may be a cliché at this point to lay electronica over action thrillers (it seems that everything about the Bourne series has been pillaged), but like all the other tropes at play here, the score seems to be both in jest and a fresh take on old material.

Wright's sense of playfulness extends to his treatment of Hanna's warped innocence. She may be completely removed from scandalous pop culture like a good homeschooled kid, but compared to the yuppie tourists who befriend her, the uselessness of today's Western cultural perspective is obvious. Hanna's own naïveté about human communication contrasts with the family's blindness to the world's horrors: she tells them that her mother died, and when the British woman softly asks how the woman passed, Hanna says, without hesitation, "Three bullets." Having never actually been places, Hanna can only relate statistical information about objects, actions or geographic locations as if a talking encyclopedia. And yet, while the Brits walk around Morocco talking big about absorbing culture and being "grounded" by the simpler parts of the world, it is Hanna who can converse with a hotelier in Arabic.

For the advantages she enjoys, however, Hanna has no idea how to interact with them, and the best she can hope for is a sliver of friendship before bad guys show up to suck her back into the underworld. Hanna may lose a bit of momentum near the end when Wright lets some of the air of the balloon, but he wins points for not reveling in the kill. Whether Hanna completes the mission her father programmed into her or not, she'll still be left in a world she does not comprehend, unfit to do anything but keep running and killing. Wright has the decency to hang a bit of a pall over the film because of this, and as exhilarating as the film can be, it stands out because of those flecks of humanity.