Hanna – The Subway Showdown
There’s a moment, right before the third act really kicks into high gear, in Wright’s “Hanna” — a quasi-science-fictional tale of a young girl (luminous “Atonement” co-star Saoirse Ronan) trained by her father (Eric Bana) to become a killer — where Bana’s character, fleeing CIA goons, descends into a German subway station. The camera tracks him as he leaves a building, past posters adorned with eyes, scribbled or sprayed in graffiti (symbolism ahoy!), and agents trying their best to look inconspicuous but failing miserably. (At one point Bana looks back at them and they try to appear casual but end up looking like a menswear model from a fifties mail order catalogue.) When Bana gets down into the subway, the camera swirls around him as the goons make their advance. Bana incapacitates them handily, as The Chemical Brothers‘ brilliant score blares, stabbing, shooting, and generally kicking their asses.
What makes this sequence so thrilling is that, with the unbroken shot and the balletic camerawork, you know for sure that it’s Eric Bana and not some dude from the stunt team doing all the work. It makes things more immediate and dangerous, with the camera oftentimes feeling like one of the agents trailing Bana (Brian De Palma understood this brilliantly). The sequence is the slickly realized antithesis to Paul Greengrass‘ shaky-cam intensity, which occasionally borders on seizure-inducing cubism (Wright consulted with Greengrass before taking the gig; Sam Mendes would do the same thing before signing on to “Skyfall“).
The subway sequence is the last big bravura moment in “Hanna,” which from here until the bloody climax, is choppier but also more breathlessly adrenalized. This is a brief and still incredibly violent pause (photographed by European cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler and a king of a Steadicam operator) before things really start to vroom. And it’s totally amazing.
The Soloist – The Big Pullback
“The Soloist” is sort of an underrated movie, one that was mired in pre-publicity bad buzz after a strategic shift in its release date by Paramount made it look like an orphaned would-be Oscar contender that wasn’t good enough to make the cut. It’s anchored by two outstanding lead performances in Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, as a schizophrenic, homeless music prodigy. We were curious, in particular, about the film’s final shot, which takes place inside of Walt Disney Concert Hall. It starts as a very tight shot on our lead characters and then pulls back, through the concert hall (they’re on a mezzanine level) and finally ends up down on the stage, between musicians who are performing. Cut to black. Roll credits.
It’s a totally dazzling way to end the movie, although bringing up this shot was somewhat painful for McGarvey. “You’ve actually made me break out in hives at the very memory of it!” he exclaimed. “We were in the Disney Concert Hall and it was a rig that had been put in at quite a large expense. It was a wire-cam system but it was custom built by the grip. Unfortunately, on the day, the whole thing fucking broke down. It was a motorized, remote control trolley system, and we had tested it and we were very pleased with our ingenuity and genius. But on the day, the motors burned on the trolley and we had to actually drag the thing with a rope, back.” Making matters worse was the limited timeframe of the shoot. “We were only there for a couple of days so we couldn’t postpone the shoot. We had to make it work.”
And make it work they did. We were still curious how they got people into position on the stage in time for the camera to swing back. McGarvey broke it down thusly: “You’ve got a third of a second to shuffle somebody in, so it appears you’re right over their shoulder…” He sighed again at the memory, before adding: “The magic of movies.”