The Hunger Games (Movie Review)

2 hrs and 22 min, color, 2012

The young reading public has swarmed all over Suzanne Collins’s direful, portentous fable and sent it soaring on the best seller charts, almost off those charts.  Over 800,000 copies sold in the four years since its publication, translated into 26 languages!   How can we aging literati fail to take notice, even those of us who have not read the book but have put ourselves through the feverish paces of watching and absorbing the movie adaptation, which according to reliable sources is quite faithful to that novel?  I have viewed better dystopian depictions of tyranny on screen, but I have sat through much worse, and I am impressed by the earnest professionalism with which the drama unfolds under the direct management of Collins herself.  She took command of the screenplay, assisted by Director Gary Ross and another writer Bill Ray.  I feared it would be gory and exploitative, but it is neither.  It is stark, but not especially distasteful, and Katniss, the main character, is competently and sensitively portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence.

In an undisclosed year far beyond our own, the North American continent has been transformed into one sizable nation called Panem, divided into twelve districts, District Twelve being the former Appalachia region, the lowest in reputation.  Every year a male and a female youth are selected by lottery from each district and shipped by rail to the capital, where they must compete in the ultimate blood sport dubbed The Hunger Games.  The twenty-four contestants (called “tributes”), after being feted in spectacular ceremonies, are turned loose into a huge forest region (somewhat booby trapped) where they must kill each other or be killed, only one survivor to emerge from the melee.  The entire event, lasting many hours, is observed on television by the entire country, each district rooting for its own tributes.  You could say that it is Reality TV carried to monstrous and gruesome proportions.  The teenaged Katniss, an expert with bow and arrow and knives, her expertise honed on many a hunting expedition in her mountain woods, finds herself competing with a young man from her district named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), whom she hardly knows.

We have all heard, or seen depicted, stories about individuals fattened up in high style before being served up to a gross malevolence ordeal for the amusement of a crowd.  The ancient ritual recited by the Gladiators, trained to fight to the death in the arena, echoes in the mind – “We who are about to die, salute you!”  The initial lottery itself in each district is even called The Reaping, as if the chosen are so many sheaves of wheat for consumption.  Give ear to Panem’s shadowy President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland): “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear,” but it is also “dangerous” and has to be “contained.”  To paraphrase: Give the subjects a big prize to hope for (like something on the order of an Olympic medal and the esteem that goes with it), but incite enough fear to keep them under control.  This has often been the unwritten credo of a family member or somebody in a relationship who alternately gives/withholds affection or rewards/punishes.  It is the most deadly of all control mechanisms, and Collins has envisioned how this would work if a government used it instead of abject cruelty and oppression as the device to enslave.    

There is another by-product of such a system of control.  Those who are thusly manipulated can eventually become just as deadly to each other.  If you choose to screen the film, note how easy so many of the twenty-four young tributes find subverting and killing to be, once they are turned loose in that forest.  Is it unheard of for children in a household dominated by this give/withhold ploy to begin manipulating each other in like manner instead of taking loving refuge together against their common domestic antagonist?  I am sure most of us have seen this kind of dynamic at work, the mistreated mistreating others mistreated.  Collins tries to imagine what such a thing would look like when an entire society functions that way.  To a great extent she succeeds.  But what is missing from the narrative is a full payload of suspense, at least from where I sit, or have I been seeing too many movies for too long.  The outcome of this fight to the death was quite apparent to me well over an hour before the movie ended.  See how you find it, unless you have read the book and already know!  Fortunately the movie’s ending, foreseeable though it may be, is not the ending of the story.  “The Hunger Games” is the first of a published trilogy, all three novels already in print, the second and third movie adaptations now in various stages of preparation.  I guess I will be checking them out when they arrive.

My comments cannot justly be concluded without due consideration to Jennifer Lawrence.  Mostly because of the admirable work she does this is more than just an action/adventure vehicle.  She gets very deftly into the character of Katniss; she knows exactly how to light each scene and each close-up from within herself.  She gives a three dimensional portrayal among a teeming multitude of one or two dimensional ones.  She has great promise as a serious actress.  In the novel Katniss narrates; in the movie she does not.  A wise decision!  Too much would have been known too early about what is driving her.  She is given more leeway to make Katniss mysterious. The film benefits considerably from that bit of mystery.

I do not recommend “The Hunger Games” for the general public.  In fact, I have no particular audience in mind.  Each will have to decide how relevant the material is to her/his life.  How much savage confrontation can you handle?  Just be advised that there is more than one kind of warfare going on in it.

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