Welcome to Casting Call. In this series I’ll be taking a look at the people who, arguably, most profoundly and most visibly effect our response to cinema; the actors. Each week I’ll profile and look at the career of an actor from one of the week’s cinema, blu ray or dvd releases, and discuss several of their films and performances.
On August 29th, Hanna comes to Blu Ray and DVD, so what better time to look at the young, but already stellar, career of its leading lady; Saoirse Ronan.
Name: Saoirse [Sur-shuh] Una Ronan
Age: 17
Born: April 12th 1994, New York
Family: Parents Paul and Monica Ronan
First Film: I Could Never Be Your Woman
Next Project: Violet and Daisy
There seems to be, right now, a glut of young female talent in Hollywood. We’ll likely come back to people like Elle and Dakota Fanning, Chloe Moretz and Hailee Steinfeld, but for most people – certainly those who saw Atonement – Saoirse Ronan is perhaps one of the most intriguing and one of the most obviously gifted young actors to have emerged in the past five years.
Born in New York, Saoirse Ronan moved back to Carlow in Ireland with her parents when she was just three. Her Father, Paul is also an actor (who took his young daughter with him on the set of The Devil’s Own when she was a year old), but it doesn’t seem that either he or Ronan’s mother Monica have been stage parents, pushing their daughter in front of a camera, indeed Saoirse has said of acting “It’s not work, it is more of a passion. It is so much fun and it is really makes you feel great at the end of the day. You feel like you are really after doing something good and you are after accomplishing something. Acting is one of these things that I can’t really describe – it’s just like, why do you love your mum and dad? You know, you just do. ”
Ronan got her first jobs in Irish TV series The Clinic and Proof, but made a big step up when, in 2005, she was cast in Amy Heckerling’s romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, playing Michelle Pfeiffer’s 11 year old daughter. Unfortunately a fine performance (and the first in a series of note perfect accents) didn’t help rescue the film from two years sitting on the shelf, before it snuck out direct to DVD in 2007.
2007 was the year that Ronan really broke through. She had a high profile role in the much anticipated Atonement, and was one of three actresses to play the role of Briony Tallis, whose lie sets the whole plot in motion. Despite being up against Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave, who played the role at age 18 and 70, it was Ronan’s 13 year old Briony who reaped the glowing critical notices, and an Oscar nomination for the fourteen year old (the first, surely, of many). Atonement was where critics and audiences noticed Ronan’s naturalism, her gift for accents, her grown up understanding of her character, her intensity, and her piercing blue eyes, which seem almost to stare through the screen at you.
Atonement led to more roles; in the amiable but commercially unsuccessful sci-fi City of Ember (a genuinely underrated film), opposite Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta Jones in the barely released Death Defying Acts (another good film which should have a wider audience) and as Susie Salmon in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones, of which, more later. Since The Lovely Bones Ronan has worked at a prolific rate, voicing the title character in the British dub of Studio Ghibli’s lovely Arrietty, playing a supporting role in Peter Weir’s The Way Back and reuniting with Atonement director Joe Wright for offbeat actioner Hanna.
For me, Saoirse Ronan’s career looks like turning into one of the most exciting in cinema. She is technically brilliant, mastering a wide array of accents and characters, and her acting has that same simple feel of reality that Jodie Foster was able to deliver when she was a child (and, to be fair, still can). I don’t feel a sense of performance when watching Saoirse Ronan, and if, at seventeen, she’s already able to vanish in a character to that degree, what brilliance will she be producing at twenty seven? Tough times lie ahead; the thorny transition to adult roles, but with work as varied as Violet and Daisy, The Host and Anna Karenina coming up, it seems that she’s already mapping out an eclectic path.
BEST FILM: Hanna (2011)
Here’s the interesting thing about Saoirse Ronan’s career; she’s been great in many films, but for my money she’s yet to be in a truly great film. Hanna has problems; the tale of a young woman bred as an assassin seeking revenge on the woman (Cate Blanchett) who made her is overcomplicated by a rather thudding fairytale metaphor, but for everything that doesn’t work in it, two things do. Chief among them is Ronan’s performance, which exists, much of the time, in those pin sharp blue eyes; forever focused on whatever her target is, but Ronan manages to credibly combine this focused assassin persona with that of a vulnerable little girl, out in the world and away from her Father (Eric Bana) for the first time. As the villains Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander (the wicked witch and the big bad wolf, though not necessarily in that order) are over the top, but also quite scary, and Bana is solid and heartfelt as Ronan’s Dad.
You might not think of Joe Wright for an action film, but he handles it well, and doesn’t drown the violence by making it incomprehensible in the cutting room. For a 12 the film is pretty punchy at times, and the fact that we can always tell what’s going on and where people are fuels a sense of involvement and danger. This is also augmented by a pounding score from The Chemical Brothers.
Hanna isn’t perfect; the fairytale stuff often feels out of place and there are some annoying characters in the form of a family Hanna hitches a ride with, but it is a fascinating film with much, not least Saoirse Ronan, to recommend it.
BEST PERFORMANCE: The Lovely Bones (2009)
The Lovely Bones is a terrible film, and I actually considered it for the next section, but the catch is, awful as the rest of the casting is, as much violence as it does to the book, as misconceived as the Heaven sequences are and as little feeling as the film generates, Ronan is flat out brilliant here.
She’s the only thing in the film that gives it real, natural, feeling; everything else feels false and calculated. It’s a genuinely soulful performance, full of light and life (which is why it’s a major miscalculation for Peter Jackson to not show the moment that is extinguished). That said, Susie is also just a normal teenage girl, with normal teenage feelings and preoccupations; an interest in photography, a first crush on a boy at school, and with a trusting personality. Ronan portrays all of this with great clarity and emotion, seldom better than when, to the sound of This Mortal Coil, a ghostly Susie gets her first kiss. She even manages to make some of the more cringemaking scenes (a fashion show in Heaven Peter, really?) play better than they really have a right to. The film is bad, but the performance is great, probably just great enough to make the film recommendable.
ONE TO MISS: I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
In truth this might be a better film than The Lovely Bones (insofar as they are even comparable), but Amy Heckerling’s middling, barely released rom-com is almost unique in what I’ve seen of Saorise Ronan’s work, because ultimately it just sort of sits there. It’s fine. Michelle Pfeiffer’s fine. Paul Rudd’s fine. It’s got a few funny lines. It’s got a baffling Tracy Ullman cameo. It’s all just very blah. Ronan gives a solid performance as Pfeiffer’s daughter, and shows off a great accent, but she’s also the centre of the film’s worst scene; a fingernails down the blackboard irritating moment in which her character sings an ‘hilarious’ parody of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic (ooh, take that 1994) which she’s renamed ‘Moronic’. Ronan can’t really sing, and it’s just not funny either. The rest of the film is not terrible, but it’s so forgettable I’d suggest you skip the intermediate step of seeing it altogether, if only because Heckerling’s much more astute and much funnier Clueless still exists.
Next Week: As Doubt comes to Blu Ray, a look at the career of Philip Seymour Hoffman
