“The Hunger Games”: A lightweight Twi-pocalypse
Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular in the spring's biggest movie -- but its vision
of the future is addled and dumb
By Andrew O'Hehir
In the world of “The Hunger Games,” the celebrity culture and media overload of
our age have been rolled back to something that approximates the middle of the
20th century, crossed with the Roman Empire. Instead of today’s narrow-casted
onslaught of Internet, cable and satellite entertainment, there’s one TV channel
and one reality show, which occupies the entire culture as nothing has in the
real world since perhaps O.J.’s Bronco chase, or the Challenger disaster. In
Panem, “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins’ nightmarish future version of
America, it’s as if the first season of “Survivor” or “American Idol” is on the
air year after year, with real killings, no competition and ratings that never
go down.
It’s an interesting scenario, I suppose, but how did this happen? Nothing in
Collins’ books, or in director Gary Ross’ simultaneously chaotic and desultory
film adaptation, even tries to explain that (or seems aware of it as a narrative
problem). Somewhere amid the civil war and widespread destruction and rise of a
totalitarian state that forms the scanty back story of “The Hunger Games,” the
collective knowingness and jadedness and pseudo-sophistication of the
Information Revolution society has evaporated. Or at least it has among the
subject populations, in the outlying districts annually compelled to supply
young combatants to the Hunger Games. Where Collins’ heroine Katniss Everdeen
(Jennifer Lawrence, in the movie) grows up, in the Appalachian coal-mining zone
called District 12, willowy women in print dresses with flyaway hair live in
tumbledown shacks, looking for all the world as if they just stepped out of a
Dorothea Lange photo essay from 1937. (Have blue jeans for women and indoor
plumbing been abolished, along with consumer society, corporate capitalism and
postmodernity in general?)
If that sounds like too much intellectual heavy lifting to apply to a
girl-centric action-romance that mashes up a bunch of disparate influences and
ingredients, from Greek mythology to Orwell to Stephen King, well, it probably
is. My point is that the patchwork of “The Hunger Games” never really holds
together or makes any sense, except as an elementary fairy tale about a young
girl’s coming of age and an incipient romantic triangle (which is the focus of
the film, far more than the book). In Collins’ novel, the first-person narration
and Katniss’ intense physical and psychological struggle seize center stage and
overwhelm the threadbare situation, at least to some degree. Ross’ movie version
— co-written by him, Collins and Billy Ray — is probably adequate to satisfy
hardcore fans, but only just. It’s a hash job that offers intriguing moments of
social satire and delightful supporting performances, but subsumes much of the
book’s page-turning drama to sub-“Twilight” teen romance. Of course it will make
a zillion dollars opening weekend, but I’m not convinced this franchise will be
as ginormous, in the long run, as Hollywood hopes.
It’s easy to be seduced by something that’s both as clever and as successful as
“The Hunger Games,” and to conclude that it must have something to say about
violence and the media and changing ideas of femininity and other hot-button
topics it appears to address. But as becomes even clearer in the movie version,
it really doesn’t. It’s a cannily crafted entertainment that refers to ideas
without actually possessing any, beyond an all-purpose populism that could
appeal just as easily to a Tea Partyer as to a left-winger. If not more so — the
true villain of “The Hunger Games” is the all-powerful state, and the population
of Panem’s capital city (in Ross’ movie, and to some extent in the book too) is
a decadent, affected and polysexual media elite, whose outrageous peacock
fashions suggest the court of Marie Antoinette appearing in a Duran Duran video.
In fact, “The Hunger Games” is precisely the thing it pretends to disapprove of:
a pulse-elevating spectacle meant to distract us from the unsatisfying situation
of the real world, and to offer a simulated outlet for youthful disaffection and
anxiety (in this case, the anxieties of girls and young women in particular).
Bread and circuses, only without the bread, and pretending to be anti-circus.
I’m not claiming that’s anything new in pop culture, and it certainly isn’t a
crime. Furthermore, the shapeless politics of “The Hunger Games” have very
little to do with the question of whether it’s any good, although they do
illustrate how calculated the whole project is.
About one ingredient there can be little question: “The Hunger Games” announces
Jennifer Lawrence’s arrival as an A-list movie star, likely at or near the level
of “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart. I’m not sure that Ross — a longtime Hollywood
insider who co-wrote “Big” for Tom Hanks, and wrote and directed “Seabiscuit” —
asks Lawrence to do half as much acting as she did in “Winter’s Bone,” but she
commands the screen with effortless magnetism, a noble innocent who is gorgeous
but not quite sexy, simultaneously a tomboy and a princess. As I saw clearly for
the first time, the character is clearly meant to invoke Artemis, the Greek
goddess of the hunt. When her younger sister’s name is drawn, against all odds,
at the annual “reaping” for Hunger Games contestants, Katniss steps forward to
take her place, beginning her appointment with destiny and her confrontation
with the cruelty of the Capitol. She’s leaving behind her friend, hunting
partner and maybe-kinda boyfriend Gale, played woodenly, or perhaps beefily, by
smoldering male-model type Liam Hemsworth.
As Collins’ readers already know, Katniss must battle to the death against 23
other “tributes” aged 12 to 18 — one boy and one girl from each of the 12
subservient districts — in an arena that appears to be a natural outdoor setting
but may not be. Now we know why Ross and the film’s producers didn’t show us any
footage of the actual Hunger Games combat in advance: They hadn’t shot any until
last week. OK, that’s unfair. Most of the book’s Games encounters are here, in
abbreviated form, but Ross and company have streamlined the story and altered
several details (some significantly), and the whole thing feels
ultra-perfunctory. Almost no actual bloodshed is depicted (in deference to the
required PG-13 rating), and during the fight sequences cinematographer Tom Stern
relies on a wobbly, nonsensical, quick-cut style that leaves you utterly unsure
about who has killed whom, and may have you squeezing your eyes shut to avoid
throwing up. The problem really isn’t the lack of explicit violence; far more
important, we get no sense of the hunger, thirst, cold, disease and harrowing
physical torment undergone by Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the shy,
blond District 12 baker’s son who has long loved her from afar. OK, they get a
few superficial nicks and scratches, but they look as well-fed and runway-ready
in the second half of the movie as they did at the beginning.
I have many more bones to pick with the Games — the Cornucopia, used by the game
designers to lure contestants into a free-for-all? So bogus! — but when you pull
back and look at the fripperies around the edges of Ross’ “Hunger Games,” it
becomes much more entertaining and nearly worthwhile. Stanley Tucci is amazing
as Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games broadcast. All of a sudden,
this universe without media savvy becomes all about media savvy, all wrapped
into this unctuous persona whose sincerity is so fake it becomes real (or the
other way around), and whose dazzling smile is at once comforting and
terrifying. As he so often can, Woody Harrelson turns Haymitch, a drunken past
winner of the Games from Katniss’ district, into a fascinating and mysterious
figure, even though the script gives him little to do. Wes Bentley plays a game
designer who must frequently consult with Panem’s sinister president (Donald
Sutherland, apparently playing Brigham Young), in expository scenes that aren’t
in the book but provide helpful background.
I also dug Lenny Kravitz, playing a stylist named Cinna who grooms Katniss for
the Games — the only person she meets in the decadent Capitol who has a shred of
genuineness or integrity — and becomes her confidant. In his sly, androgynous
sexiness, Kravitz has way more chemistry and connection with Lawrence than do
Hemsworth or Hutcherson, playing the two lunkheads supposedly smitten with
Katniss. I’d way rather watch a love story about Katniss and Cinna than the
lightweight Twi-triangle inflicted on us by Ross, who has (with Collins’
permission, evidently) stripped his heroine of almost all her Artemis-like
uncertainty about boys and romance. (In the book, you couldn’t be quite sure
Katniss wasn’t a lesbian, at least at first.)
But we’re not getting Katniss and Cinna, of course, and we don’t get anything
that feels remotely like an ending in this clunky, clumsy adaptation; the story
reaches a certain point and the curtain simply drops. Wait another year and
spend another $12, and you’ll get another chapter. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but
that just seems mean (and neither the Harry Potter nor the “Twilight” series
were quite this blatant about it). I realize it will probably work, or work well
enough. “The Hunger Games” has some cool moments here and there, and is never
entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven’t screwed
it up badly enough to kill it, although they’ve tried. Go ahead and put that on
your poster.
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