Now and Then: LITTLE WOMEN

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women faithfully adapts that novel’s cozy qualities, its warm-hearted temperament, closely observed sentiment, and its easy grip on its audience’s sympathies. The story of the four March daughters and their quiet domestic pleasantries and tragedies, relationships and developments, is put across faithfully with great spirited sisterly energy, as loving and honest as the best, closest sibling friendships. Certainly, Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel of Civil War-era family life has produced plenty faithful adaptations before. Gerwig casts well, keeps a good pace, shepherds expert production design and textured cinematography, dramatizes every memorable scene, and has a keen eye for filmic detail. But what really lifts it off and sets it apart is the structure. She takes the two halves of the book — the early younger days where the young ladies are first flowering into adolescence and figuring out themselves and world; and then as slightly older young women as they mature into the adult lives they’ll live — and places them side by side. There are many other adaptations to reiterate the text in sequential order. Here it’s both familiar and fresh, enlivened by the contrast. Cutting intuitively between these two periods of time, each with their own conflicts and concerns, yet intertwined through the personalities of the women involved, there are echoes and comparisons, connections and collisions. Viewing the events in this way is a freshly productive way of understanding the classic story, of seeing anew how the decisions and personalties of girlhood directly inform and shape the outcomes of womanhood as they grow and change, either fulfilling their early dreams or deciding to go about them in a different way.

There’s great maturity and inquisitiveness here, seeing the grown-up concerns of money and careers and family obligations set against the children’s imagination and fervor and mood. It also serves to stack moments of great emotional peaks on top of each other, weddings atop funerals, recoveries atop deathly sickness, reunions atop separations, loneliness atop togetherness. And yet each scene works splendidly on its own, apart from the brilliant structural conceit, Gerwig imbuing the moments with tender humanity and deep wells of feeling. Saoirse Ronan (Jo), Emma Watson (Meg), Florence Pugh (Amy), and Eliza Scanlen (Beth), deftly balancing between the timelines with depth, energy, and poise, make believable sisters, jostling their differing personalties and divergent paths against each other over a consistent underpinning of love. (The rest of the cast — Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Bob Odenkirk, Louis Garrel — is perfectly assembled out of character actors who bring their decades of good work and reliable screen presences to the overwhelming sense of comfort and compassion, even in hard times, in this telling.) With an enveloping spirit of goodwill, charting the family’s dramas in sweet, sharp episodic detail, Gerwig builds to a climax of such tricky dexterity, an intertwining of plot catharsis with a sweetly considered, effervescently casual metatextuality that pays off with delicate, simple visual flourishes and an overflow of emotion. It sees passionately in Jo a creative spirit, all too aware of the compromises expected of her gender and class, headstrong in pursuit of her ambitions, and heartrendingly perceptive about her strengths and weaknesses, borne aloft in the end by the strength of her own story. What a thrill that Gerwig has not only built a fully satisfying, deeply moving retelling of a classic novel, but also builds into the bones a compelling argument about it.

Welcome to New York: BROOKLYN

“Heartbreak,” as Taylor Swift tells us, “is the national anthem.” This sentiment is the backdrop of Brooklyn, an achingly sensitive little movie, small in scope, but deep in emotional risk. It stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, a young Irish woman in the 1950s who finds opportunities dead-ending in a part-time job at a small-town shop. She tearfully and nervously bids her mother and sister farewell, setting sail for New York City, where a kind priest has arranged for her to have a safe place to stay and a nice entry-level job in Brooklyn. What a big step for anyone to make, let alone a young person with no connections or comforts, with only a small suitcase and the clothes on her back. The movie, movingly bookended by boat journeys, finds great power and exquisitely observed emotions in this brave and difficult move. Restrained and heartfelt, the story proceeds simply and delicately.

We see Eilis make tentative connections, to the opinionated landlady (Julie Walters) and chatty lodgers at the all-female boarding house for Irish immigrants at which she lives, to the intimidating but decent boss (Jessica Paré) at a department store at which she finds work, to the avuncular priest (Jim Broadbent) who checks in on her and helps find new opportunities for education and advancement. There’s a lovely sense of community slowly developing around our main character, as she navigates a foreign world she’s slowly ever more determined to make her home. In the early passages, she is shy and withdrawn, ill with homesickness, tearing up over letters from home, or when hearing a Celtic singer at a Thanksgiving supper for Irish-American homeless men. The tug of her safe and comfortable past is strong, but will she let it interfere with gaining a foothold in a new, scary future?

Her most significant new relationship is with a charming young Italian-American man (Emory Cohen) who draws her in with his flirtatious teasing, sweet empathy, and loveable lopsided grin, all tangled up in his chewy accent, broad and bold. They start going out, chastely dating, attending church dances, family dinners, and the movies, like Singin’ in the Rain, which excites him enough to perch on a lamppost in the park while he walks her home. The boss notices a change in her demeanor and, upon learning it’s because of a fella, asks, “Does he talk about baseball or his mother?” “No.” “Then keep him.” The blushing excitement of young love merges with the excitement of making a life for herself that’s entirely her own, and tempered by the fading but still present pull of Ireland, where her family is increasingly only distant but powerful memories. She’s still deciding who she wants to be, and how best to define herself.

Soft, but deeply felt, the movie keeps a tight focus on Eilis, considering Ronan’s face, possessed with a placid maturity revealing flickers of feelings turbulent underneath a surface of great propriety. Eilis is a quiet character, who feels intensely, but still takes her time making up her mind. Ronan allows this to be her source of strength, a studied and reserved exterior projecting kindness and thoughtfulness. It’s a film that prizes such quiet contemplation, studying Ronan’s eyes for subtle sparkles, and allowing the ensemble to exude universal warmth. Tenderly developing relationships are watched growing, shifting, and evolving, in a plot animated by humorous charm and realistic sentimentality, arriving at big moments of grief and elation with a softly insistent tugging on heartstrings. It’s a grade-A weepie, not only because of any particular moment of sorrow or grace, though it has those well-done, but from the spectrum of small moments, colored in with emotional specificity.

John Crowley directs with great easy rhythms in poised pacing and bright, warm colors. Tasteful period detail is neither fussed over nor show-offy; it’s simply a fact of life, a time and place the oldest in the audience can still remember, conjured up with the edges sanded down. It’s not exactly a reflection of 50’s politics or unease. It’s far too personal and intimate for that, attuned directly and pleasingly with its lead’s innermost feelings. Crowley is a filmmaker with a penchant for sensitive character studies, especially his 2007 feature Boy A, which followed a young ex-con adjusting into his new freedom. There’s a different sort of dramatic change at play in Brooklyn, but it’s no less carefully considered. Nick Hornby, adapting a novel by Colm Tóibín, has a great ear for internal conflict teased out through conversation and calm, capably and movingly brought to life by an exceptional cast. It’s a film about a big transatlantic move, rich with heartbreak and isolation slowly thawed through warm friendships, then complicated by the temptation to give up and move home.

Hornby first became known for novels about men in relationships vividly externalized (High Fidelity, About a Boy), but has become a fine writer of screenplays about women finding themselves through internalized decisions (An Education, Wild). He and Crowley may have authored the film, their respective bests, but it belongs to Ronan, who dominates every frame with a gentle inescapable magnetism. She’s able to communicate the subtlest of feelings through subtle changes of expression, and yet somehow the effect is anything but obscure. She’s found happiness, and yet feels divided loyalties. No matter her American successes, there’s the strong call of Ireland, where her mother would love to see her, and the locals would be happy to set her up with a nice boy from the village. She has the understandable confidence it takes to move across the world, and the fear of failure. Brooklyn gets big effects out of small gestures, a comforting classical melodrama shorn of nostalgia, except, perhaps, for how much easier it was then to live in New York on a clerk’s salary. The result is a terrifically involving empathetic and emotional excursion. 

Heart of Dullness: LOST RIVER

Ryan Gosling makes his directorial debut with Lost River, an impressively controlled artful nothing. It’s 95 minutes of misfiring aesthetic signifiers coming from the same impulses that led him to work with Nicolas Winding Refn twice (in the good Drive and awful Only God Forgives). Here Gosling loves to provide striking images, woozy with neon and darkness, blood and fire. There are slow motion tracking shots to nowhere, lingering on hardships, and long looks at extreme violence real and imagined, literal and figurative. Dripping with empty visual interest, it lays out its graphical approach quickly, and then grows monotonous. As for character and story, his screenplay regards them as just more elements of design rather than features unto themselves. As a result, the film is a static, uninvolving slog, shorn free of narrative momentum and symbolic importance alike.

That’s not to say the movie is devoid of ideas. It’s a vague statement on the decrepit state of the American dream at its lowest points. Finding his story among the marginalized and impoverished, Gosling films Detroit’s ruins as a stand in for a fictional city, Lost River, drowned by economic disaster. Residents are fleeing. Structures and infrastructure are crumbling. Exploitation and arson are common activities. A nearby dam was once a promise of progress, but has only left an underwater neighborhood to show for it. In all this decay we meet a single mom (Christina Hendricks) about to lose her home, unable to pay her predatory mortgage. Gosling piles on miseries and films them with a surface beauty, taking aesthetic pleasure in pain.

Hendricks’s sons, a young man (Iain De Caestecker) and a toddler (Landyn Stewart), are smudged and sad. Their neighbors, a mute old woman (Barbara Steele) and her granddaughter (Saoirse Ronan), live amidst stacks of hoarded garbage. There’s a depressed feeling hanging over it all. Where’s the hope, when they’re the last remaining people on the block? Those who’ve remained can barely scrape out a living. A sleazy bank manager (Ben Mendelsohn) sees how desperate Hendricks is to make payments and offers her a job at a macabre nightmare burlesque run by a horror-loving madam (Eva Mendes) quick to splash fake blood. Meanwhile, her older son makes money selling copper scavenged out of abandoned buildings and runs afoul of a self-proclaimed scrap metal kingpin (Matt Smith).

This villainous presence – a howling buzzcut weirdo driven around in a vintage car with an easy chair attached in the back – is just one of many oddball elements presented entirely straight-faced.  (I didn’t even mention his habit of cutting off people’s lips with scissors.) There are strange rituals, dreadful recurring symbols, talk of a town curse, a scene where a woman slowly cuts her face and peels back the skin, and a musical interlude involving a creepy rendition of an old Bob Nolan western song. There’s certainly a dreamy animating spirit behind this, tumbling from odd sight to surreal aside. But there’s never a coherent worldview aside from how cool it’s supposed to look and how seriously we’re to take it, sub-Lynchian bafflement without a point.

The actors are mostly left to their own devices, doing as much as they can with as little as they’re given. Gosling doesn’t appear to be interested in using actors for anything other than how his cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, Enter the Void) can place them in the frame. The result is a movie of moments and images without connective tissue logical, emotional, narrative, or political. There are feints towards all of those, but no actual strikes. Gosling proves himself a filmmaker of terrific aesthetic control. He could be a great director someday. But this is a most enervating start. He’s proven he can conjure an interesting look, if one borrowed from Refn, Cianfrance, Malick, and even some directors he hasn’t worked with. If he gets behind the camera again, let’s hope he can find something to say.

A Story Told in a Twilight: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a caper perched between the World Wars. Writer-director Wes Anderson (inspired by the writings of Austrian author Stefan Zweig) creates an abstracted Old World caught as it is disappearing, a colorful fantasy Europe that’s poisoned by drab fascist forces and left forever changed. In true Anderson fashion, he’s designed his fictional European country (Zubrowka, he names it) as a candy-colored dollhouse of meticulous design. At the center is The Grand Budapest Hotel of the title. It’s a wondrous creation, a massive structure nestled in the Alps where it looks for all the world like a hotel Rankin and Bass characters might’ve passed on their way to the North Pole. Its exterior is a pale pink, floors stacked like a cheerfully, elaborately frosted wedding cake. Inside, a lushly carpeted and handsomely furnished labyrinth of luxuries wraps around itself in a square that forces guests and employees alike to walk in crisp geometric patterns. At this Hotel, a caper is hatched, a war encroaches, then years later a writer is inspired. Still later, that writer’s work lives on, calling us back into its melancholic past.

Layers upon layers, the film is a memory inside a book inside a movie. As it begins, a young woman opens a book and begins to read. The author (Tom Wilkinson) appears to us in his office, ready to recount the time he first heard the story his book relays. We see The Author as a Young Man (Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest in the late 1960s, now a cavernous, sparsely populated space not too far removed from The Shining territory, albeit without the supernatural elements. The author meets a lonely old man (F. Murray Abraham) who invites the author to hear the story of how he became the owner of the hotel. Intrigued, the author agrees. And so back once more into the past we go, to the 1930s, when the Grand Budapest was at its peak. For each time period, Anderson designates a different aspect ratio, boxy Academy Ratio 30s stretch into anamorphic late-60s, before growing shallow and simple in 16x9 present day. It’s as mischievous as it is exact, moving through time with clear visual orientation.

The film spends the bulk of its time in the 1930s. We meet Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), a supercilious dandy who manages the Grand Budapest Hotel with a suave charm and a composed pompous sincerity. His new lobby boy (Tony Revolori) tells of the man’s peccadilloes, namely wooing the little old ladies that visit the hotel. These early passages operate with a dizzying fizz, whiffs of the Lubitsch touch generating much sophisticated posturing and door-slamming farce. Anderson here, working with deep focus lenses and finely calibrated tragicomic performances, has the giddy architectural design of Lubitsch’s silents and the bubbly urbane wit of his talkies. The boy and his boss move through a world of color as vivid as in any Powell/Pressburger film, helping the Grand Budapest’s guests in any way they can. Fiennes and Revolori’s performances are nicely synchronized, the former a fatuous perfectionist, the latter a wide-eyed innocent whose deadpan acceptance in the face of disbelief and disaster balances it out.

Through briskly delivered dialogue and a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat, the metronome is set perfectly for a caper that’s about to erupt, escalating in suspense and incident at an engaging tempo. As the plot gets underway, one of Gustave’s very rich elderly lovers (Tilda Swinton, beneath a generous application of makeup) has died. At the reading of the will, all her most distant acquaintances arrive, shocked to hear that the hotel manager has been left her most valuable painting. While her lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) assures her son (Adrian Brody) that this late-arriving addendum must be authenticated, Gustave and his lobby boy abscond with the painting and take off for the Grand Budapest. Soon, the woman’s son’s thug (Willem Dafoe), a missing butler (Mathieu Amalric), a fascist Inspector (Edward Norton), a scowling prisoner (Harvey Keitel), a sweet baker (Saoirse Ronan), the leader of a team of concierges (Bill Murray), and more get pulled into a scampering plot involving locating, hiding, or aiding and abetting the movement of this most desirable painting.

All the while, the threat of violence looms large. Soldiers brutishly ask travelers for papers. Guards are stabbed to death. A pet meets a gory end. Fingers are misplaced. The film is crisply playful in unspooling its brisk and wry heist plot, loving in its evocation of period-appropriate cinematic touchstones, from the aforementioned Lubitsch and Powell/Pressburger to a mountain cable car right out of Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich. It’s affectionately constructed, miniatures adding whimsy that somehow doesn’t distract from the real menace in the action.  Nonchalant gore, periodic splashes of vibrant red and matters of life and death in an otherwise charmingly pastel, idealized Old World Europe maintains reality as an inescapable intrusion. No matter the perfectly constructed melancholy nostalgia, the violence of greed and war are an inevitable erosion of this ideal.

The fizzy sophistication of loose permissiveness as signified by Gustave’s unflappable reign of pleasure in the Grand Budapest grows frazzled and tossed as he’s thrown, by his plotting and by the march of time, into danger and exile, on the run from dark intimations of violence and despair. Though, like a typical Wes Anderson protagonist, he projects confidence, even when circumstances are at their most dire. He thinks he’ll get by because that’s all he’s ever planned on. He carries himself with great sense of purpose, even when stumbling into situations deteriorating rapidly, falling into doom, or at least humiliation. The entire oddball ensemble has characters similarly driven towards their goals, a perfect set of traits for people in a story of careful caper construction. When the cogs fall into place and the wheels make their final turn, interlocking every variable, it’s most satisfying, indeed.

For Anderson, film is an artifice, but his style is never an affectation. His pictorial beauty (again with his usual cinematographer Robert Yeoman), visual wit, symmetric blocking, high angle shots, laconic profundities, dead-pan peculiarities, 90-degree whip pans, finicky fonts, cutaway gags, witty repartee, and editorial precision (this time with editor Barney Pilling) add up to an intensely personal and deeply felt playfulness. He comes by his style honestly, carefully, a magic blend of planning and happenstance. It’s all too easy to imagine making a mockery of such meticulousness, but all Anderson parodies miss the depth roiling within the rich and lovingly assembled surfaces. Here is a film that’s on one level a lark, with its bouncy caper, funny lines, and familiar faces. Crescendos of tension and suspense build into action sequences of tremendous delight and dips of apprehension. But underneath sits the darkness.

Here he creates a world of colorful eccentricity soon to be snuffed out, or at least irreparably damaged, by the marching armies at the border. After it all, the Grand Budapest remains, but the world it represents can only be accessed through stories. Layers upon layers of storytelling, of artifice, are not arbitrary comic filigrees or distancing effects. Here the tragedies of the past linger with overwhelming melancholy as we back out of our main story, to the old man who at one point stops his tale to wipe back tears, to the young woman who cherishes the book in which it was immortalized, to the audience as the lights come up and the credits roll. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a totally enveloping aesthetic pleasure, funny and exciting, sharp and sad, so very moving, so completely transporting.

Two's a Crowd: THE HOST

I’m of two minds about Andrew Niccol’s The Host, which is just as well, since so is the protagonist. She’s a girl living in an unspecified future after alien body snatchers have invaded. These aliens are parasitic souls who’ve attached themselves to human hosts, making their presence known through the eerie blue glow they add to the eyes. The earth belongs to them. Few humans survive. At the movie’s start, the girl is captured by these beings and turned into one of them. Rather than conforming to the pod people ways like everyone else, she fights back the best she can. All she can do is scream from within her own thoughts, a captive in her own body, a body that is controlled by someone else entirely. That’s a creepy concept. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers template focuses on those left to grapple with neighbors who suddenly become something they’re not. Here the unusual ones, the rarities, are the humans, our entry point into the story a human who is resisting her own private alien invasion. The movie that comes out of this is very serious about its silliness, by turns likable and laughable.

The early scenes of the movie require a tricky bit of acting from Saoirse Ronan, who plays Melanie, the girl forced to share her brain with an interstellar stranger. The other possessed humans want to find the remaining pristine human holdouts and colonize them as well. A lead Seeker (Diane Kruger) urges Wanderer, the alien taking Melaine over, to access the girl’s thoughts and memories and reveal the location of hidden humans. Melanie strains to not reveal what she knows about her brother (Chandler Canterbury), her boyfriend (Max Irons) and the humans they were travelling to meet. It’s a struggle between two characters that has to play out in one actor. There’s a funny little moment early on where Ronan begins writing but then, with a sudden, quick flick of her wrist, throws the pencil across the room. Sudden jolts of humanity cause the alien, still getting used to her new body, to respond to fleeting thoughts of resistance bubbling up from her host. Niccol uses copious voice over to put us in this warring mind so that Ronan ends up giving what amounts to a vocal performance that demarcates two similarly willful characters.

It’s a compellingly oddball scenario. Soon, the alien finds sympathy for the poor girl she’s forced to share headspace with and helps the two-in-one of them flee into the desert. There, led by Wanderer’s legs and Melanie’s memories, they find a group of humans huddled in the caves, farming what they can and stealing the rest from a warehouse that the alien beings have for some reason branded simply “Store.” This particular group of human rebels, one that now includes Melaine’s brother and her boyfriend, happen to be led by Melaine’s uncle, a bearded, appropriately avuncular William Hurt. He’s a gentle, resourceful survivalist who knows his way around post-apocalyptic engineering and says things like “I always liked science fiction stories. Never thought I’d be in one.” He holds out hope that his niece is still somewhere behind the glowing blue eyes that cause the other humans to want her dead on the spot, thinking that she’ll reveal their location. The rebels are used to fleeing the possessed, and indeed we eventually see a few brief but impactful car chases and shootouts as Seekers draw closer to their hideout while searching for Wanderer.  

As this is adapted from a novel by Stephenie Meyer, the woman who brought us the sparkly paranormal love triangle of Twilight, the caves are also an incubator for strange love geometry. Love triangle doesn’t quite cut it here. The boyfriend is hesitant to embrace this new being that looks and sounds just like his love while one of the other survivors (Jake Abel) finds himself drawn to the new girl’s personality, which just happens to be in the old girl’s body. Much talk of which girl has which feelings pervade the second half of the film. There’s also much more interesting discussion about how trustworthy this newcomer is and how much of the old girl still lives insider her. As Wanderer gains more sympathy and understanding of the human’s plight, there are some ethical quandaries about who really has control over this girl. The audience has access to inner struggles between the two characters; the other people see only the change. Do they treat her as the old girl they knew or the new girl they’ve come to know? The romance of it all is admirably downplayed at times, but there’s still too much hemming and hawing over who is being kissed and by whom. Still, there’s something so determinedly weird about seeing a conventional make out scene play out with a voice over objection from the other person trapped inside. “No! Stop that!” the girl mentally yells at the alien in control of her. I found it easy to scoff, but not so easy to dismiss.

Niccol has written and directed movies like the very good Gattaca, about a futurist struggle against genetic determinism, and the very mediocre In Time, an on-the-nose income inequality allegory that swaps time for money. With The Host, he’s clearly interested in exploring the deeper questions, engaging with the material in a way that draws a messy statement about personal autonomy and resisting conformity and all manner of half-formed intriguing ideas. It fills the film with lots of ponderous discussions that always sound like they’re building to something much more profound than they really are. So much of the movie refuses to make sense, either immediately – why are all humans with alien souls inside them dressing in white? – or after the fact. Some scenes play out with a flat, unintentionally funny, affect and, as the plot drifts through its paces, I found myself understanding character motivations less and less. It grows fuzzier as it nears its conclusions. But there’s something I found difficult to ignore in the mood of it all, in the stillness and slickness of Roberto Schaefer’s lovely, sleek cinematography and the lush score by Antonio Pinto. There’s a dreamily still strangeness to it all, an echo of 70’s B-movie sci-fi in its simple effects, limited sets, and off-kilter normality. I found it compelling enough in its confident awkwardness to somehow hold its schlock and seriousness in my head at the same time. I can’t exactly say I totally liked it, but I sure didn’t dislike it.

The Most Dangerous Game: HANNA

Of all the directors I would have guessed capable of making a great action thriller, I would not have thought of Joe Wright, he of two good to great literary adaptations (Pride & Prejudice and Atonement) and one undercooked based-on-a-true-story prestige picture (The Soloist). And yet, with his latest film Hanna, Wright has not only made a great action film, he’s made one that thrilled me sometimes as much as any of the great action films of the last decade. Released into theaters after weeks upon weeks of cluttered cacophony, seeing this film is like stepping out of a desert into a deep cool pool.

This film is one of rapid-fire patience, taking its time to set up its killer action sequences and, when they appear, they play out in unexpected ways both artfully fractured and shockingly fluid. It’s a Grimm fairy tale for the modern age (and similarly dark and unsuitable for small children) in which a young teenaged girl is forced out of the woods into a noisy world of chaos and beauty, strange sights and squirmy menace. There’s even a wicked witch of a villain with devious henchman on the hunt for blood. For that’s what awaits Hanna (a fierce performance from Saoirse Ronan), the girl in question.

She’s been raised in isolation for her entire life, living somewhere below the arctic circle in a little cabin in the woods. Her father (Eric Bana) has trained her to be a survivor. She’s an incredible shot with a bow and arrow as we see in the patient, quiet opening scene in which she emerges from the snowy woods and kills off a large deer. She’s a quick, skillful hunter of beast, but she’s been trained to apply these skills more generally. She’s a warrior child. She knows many languages. She knows many practical skills. She may be ignorant of the outside world – she knows no electricity, nor music, nor any other people other than the ones in her well-read copy of Grimm’s fairy tales that she keeps under her pillow and reads by firelight – but she’s more than capable of handling herself when danger and menace is called into her world, forcing her into globetrotting action.

Her father digs up a box with a switch. This, he tells his daughter, will tell Marissa Viegler where they are. Marissa (the great Cate Blanchett), we are soon to find out, is a meticulous C.I.A. agent who knew the father (and his then infant daughter) before he became a “rogue asset.” Hanna decides she is ready and flips the switch. A plan for revenge has been set into motion. Her father flees. She knows where to meet him later. She’s taken by armed men who appear surrounding their cabin and then she wakes up miles and miles away from her home in a vaguely military complex in a small grey room surrounded by a surrealistic omnipresence of cameras. She waits. She plays Viegler’s game. Then, when the time is right, she escapes. Her goal? To make sure this “witch” is dead.

This is a coming-of-age action thriller that’s entirely enthralling from beginning to end with an incredible character in Hanna. It’s just as tense to watch her navigate the social world as it is to see her in hand-to-hand combat. She stumbles upon a vacationing British family (with a warm Olivia Williams playing matriarch) and is perplexed and intrigued by them, even making something like a friend with another teenaged girl (Jessica Barden). Hanna is amazed and frightened by things like television and even fluorescent lights. She doesn’t seem to understand all too quickly the ways in which so-called “normal” people behave. But she sees something valuable in this family, something in which she aspires to be included. But this fragile piece of normality is threatened by Viegler who is hunting down father and daughter with the help of a not-entirely-legal creep (Tom Hollander) who emerges fully formed as a great villainous figure, complete with the best whistled musical motif since Bernard Herrmann wrote the score for Twisted Nerve.

There’s a simple clarity of character here, as in a fairy tale, with exaggerated good and evil types that nonetheless proceed to dance in the grey areas of such easy definitions. There are fantastic, teeth-gnashing performances all around, but Ronan especially brings a fire and fragility to Hanna that helps to sell the emotion underneath the action. But what action it is! Set to a pounding, slippery score from The Chemical Brothers, Joe Wright stages action in unexpected places in unexpected ways with silky smooth swoops of the Steadicam. The film features confrontations in, among other places, a subway station, a desert, a shipyard and a foggy abandoned carnival. The imagery floats between the dream-like and the gritty, visualizing the coming-of-age themes with a fuzzy, conflicted intensity. There’s a feeling of the world as an incomprehensibly diverse place that fits Hanna’s disorientation.

She’s been prepared to survive but has she been prepared to live? It’s a question that many a young person, leaving home for the first time, finds echoing in the mind. Here’s a gripping action-thriller that dramatizes that question in a supremely entertaining fashion. By the end of the film, when the villainess emerges from a concrete wolf’s head (echoes upon echoes of fairy tales), the film has crystallized its central thematic conflict with two lines. One, spoken to Viegler as a weary declaration of parental sadness and pride: “Kids grow up.” The other, spoken by Viegler to Hanna: “Don’t you walk away from me young lady!” Here’s a film about the fact that children grow up, hopefully defeating the conflicts of their parents in order to move past them and have a better life, and how difficult a process that can be. I make it sound so solemn, but one of its greatest assets is how it can hint at larger themes while keeping them just under the surface of a larger-than-life film of seemingly unlimited eccentricity. It’s a hugely successful film of action and style that expects an audience capable of thought, not just mindless reaction to stimuli.