Gary Ross (2012)

The Hunger Games is a fast-moving 142 minutes and surprisingly easy to stay interested in, although part of what kept me interested was thinking how it might have been better, more challenging to the young adult audience at whom it’s primarily aimed.   In a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future, North America comprises twelve Districts.  Each year, a teenage boy and girl from each District are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games.  Only one of the twenty-four contestants – or ‘tributes’, as they’re called – will survive.  Although this wasn’t clear to me from the film, I assume the winner gains not only celebrity but food supplies for their District, much needed in the case of the region whose representatives the story focuses on – District 12, a poor mining community where the adolescents are already hunters or gatherers.   The film opened in late March and, in return for a budget of $78m, has grossed nearly $400m in its first two weeks.  It’s based on the first of a hugely successful trilogy of young adult novels by Suzanne Collins, who worked on the screenplay with Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) and Billy Ray.   The Games, covered round-the-clock on national television, represent a grim extension of the potential of reality TV; as such, they might cause the kids who read the Collins book and go to the film to question the morality of less truly lethal examples of the genre.  But the movie, at least, doesn’t do this:  it uses the Games as the context for the two District 12 principals to prove their heroism and their love for each other.

The novel is narrated in the first person by the girl from District 12, Katniss Everdeen.   There’s no voiceover in the film but Katniss’s point of view is so dominant that there’s never any doubt that she’ll survive.   Adapting the material for the screen allowed an opportunity to present the competitors as a group from whom, like the TV audience of the Hunger Games, the cinema audience might choose their favourite to root for – but the film-makers aren’t prepared to take that risk:  they’re chiefly concerned with replicating as much as they can the experience already enjoyed by fans of the book.   Katniss and her male counterpart Peeta Mellark are mentored by Haymitch Abernathy, a former winner of the contest who now has a serious drink problem.  This is fine as an idea but it serves to emphasise how unconvincing it is that these Games are in their seventy-fourth year.   There’s no sense of Games lore.  When the people behind the event announce midway through the contest they’ll allow two competitors to survive, I couldn’t believe either that this was the first time in more than seven decades (as it seems) they’d felt the need to adjust the rules of the game – or that the tributes would take the authorities at their word, wouldn’t assume there’d have to be a sting in the tail.  As, of course, there is.   The gesture of magnanimity and commercial shrewdness is really on the part of Suzanne Collins towards her audience.  There’s colossal ballyhoo and cheering crowds when the tributes first arrive for the contest but Gary Ross is vague about the way things develop in the television coverage or in the television audience.   The outcome of TV competitions from The X-Factor downwards is treated as cosmically important even now yet there’s no build of hysterical or sentimental momentum in the Hunger Games, which really are a matter of life and death.  Except for a cocky jerk of a white boy and a nice black girl, the tributes competing against Katniss and Peeta barely register as characters.   You never get any feeling of a tension between the kids’ sense of kinship and their deadly rivalry; nor of the tension between the proximity of both celebrity and extinction.

Life in the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone was so emphatically grim that Jennifer Lawrence, who played the heroine Ree in that film, seems a natural choice to play Katniss.  Ree had ideas about getting away to join the armed forces; Katniss is a mean shot.  As Ree looked after her siblings, so Katniss volunteers as the District 12 girl tribute in place of her terrified younger sister, who’s the one actually chosen.  The mother in both movies is wanly dependent on her elder daughter.   I thought Lawrence’s performance in Winter’s Bone was overrated – I liked her a lot more here.  From the start, Katniss – fearless, inscrutable, rarely smiling – is different from her contemporaries and competitors but Lawrence develops shadings to the character; she’s also convincingly athletic and physically tough, and heroic in a way that’s not obvious.   Josh Hutcherson, who played the son in The Kids Are All Right, is an excellent partner for her – his pleasant-looking ordinariness and emotional depth are a highly effective combination.  The adults include actors who are not my favourites but enjoyable here – you sense because they’re not taking things too seriously.   Woody Harrelson is particularly good as the volatile, raddled Haymitch; Donald Sutherland, as the head of state President Snow, has hair and beard that go with his name:  he suggests a quietly malignant Old Testament God figure.  The other powers-that-be wear an odd assortment of costumes and hairdos – they suggest New Romantics as much as anything else – and the actors in more comical roles have varying success.  Stanley Tucci, as the television anchor, seems a little uncertain at first but works up a rich concoction of suave, nasty camp.  Toby Jones is effortlessly eccentric as his sidekick.  Elizabeth Banks as the woman who comes to District 12 to officiate at the ‘reaping’, at which the tributes are named, seems merely silly.  The head ‘Gamemaker’ is played by Wes Bentley – the first time I’ve seen him, apart from his role in the remake of The Four Feathers, since American Beauty.

The unsuccessful contestants die mostly gruesome deaths although I didn’t find the violence excessive, given what I was expecting.  (The film has been cut in the UK to earn its 12A certificate – it’s PG-13 in the US.)   The ending is highly unresolved to make way for the screen adaptation of the second part of the trilogy.   President Snow is thinking out his next move; although Katniss and Peeta both make it through, the question of their long-term love life together is uncertain – Gayle (Liam Hemsworth), Katniss’s boyfriend back in District 12, is still on the scene.   I was expecting him to volunteer to replace the selected tribute too and he must be regretting his decision not to.   The film is scored obviously but effectively by John Newton Howard and edited by two of the best in the business, Stephen Mirrione and Juliette Welfling.

1 April 2012