Review: The Hunger Games (2012)
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth
Director: Gary Ross
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: For an additional perspective on The Hunger Games, read Kevin Ketchum’s review.
Two sisters hand-in-hand amidst a crowd. A gaudy stage has been erected in the courtyard of a rural community. The setting is science-fiction but this ramshackle town is so technologically backwards that it could be the 1950s. Except, of course, for the stage. Along with hundreds of adolescents aged 12 to 18, the sisters are there to watch the results of a draw, where two onlookers, a girl and a boy, will be chosen to participate in the annual “hunger games,” a competition where 24 youngsters from 12 districts battle to the death, until only one contestant remains. This is the punishment bequeathed to the districts by the opulent city state of Panem, which now rules over the territory of what used to be North America, regulating the far-flung districts like a futuristic Rome administering its lands. The stage has been built by emissaries from Panem, to furnish the draw with spectacle and glitz: long television screens serve as background, while a grotesquely made-up, doll-like, shrill woman stands behind the microphone, beaming a monstrous smile, pretending like the “hunger games” and the draw are something other than what they are, an elaborate execution. Inside a glass bowl swim scraps of paper with scribbled names. The doll-like woman removes one of these and reads: one of the sisters is picked. In a protective impulse, the other sibling, a few years older and more mature, volunteers to “tribute” - or participate in the “hunger games” - instead. Her proposal is accepted. Panem doesn’t care who is sacrificed. One sister is as good as another. And so our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, begins her journey, alongside the other contestant from her district, the boy Peeta Mellark.
Katniss is only a country girl, and all this commotion - along with the life-or-death necessity of rising above it - feels as dangerous as any slashed knife or flash wildfire she later confronts during the actual event.
This scene comes early, but it signals the elements that make the whole film work. When the name is read, there are no roaring musical cues nor overdramatic zooms. This is an important moment which propels the rest of the narrative. It is also an emotional juncture for the characters. If the younger sister Primrose leaves for the “hunger games,” her young age will likely doom her against stronger 17 and 18-year-olds. But the film makes no obvious grab for our heartstrings. It is rather more concerned with portraying an experience, the shock and bewilderment. As little Primrose dazes over to the stage, the soundscape floods with mumbled voices and shuffling feet. A handheld, shaky camera follows her. Throughout the film, it will keep protagonists in focus and drown their disorienting environment in a blurry sea, confusing the action but emphasizing emotion. When Katniss volunteers to replace her sister, the aesthetic remains unchanged. And so throughout the running time. After she arrives on Panem, Katniss is set to appear on national television, during a talk show where each participant of the “hunger games” attempts to make an impression. When she steps into view of the cameras and the live audience, wearing a beautiful red dress with flaming folds, the film’s aesthetic again reflects her baffled subjectivity. Noise is drowned out, becomes distorted. Lights distract and discombobulate our hero. Katniss is only a country girl, and all this commotion - along with the life-or-death necessity of rising above it - feels as dangerous as any slashed knife or flash wildfire she later confronts during the actual event. To survive during the “hunger games,” which are fought in an enclosed forest terrain, she will need the help of sponsors who might send her supplies, and to earn those, she must impress during the preview stages of the competition. Every televised appearance has mortal implications.
Shaky cams and shallow focus are nothing new. The former devise has even inspired sweltering debates, usually from startled viewers of the Bourne series. It typically aims to convey either the alarm of battle - and, thus, to be mostly confined to or emphasized during action sequences - or some kind of cinema verité pretension. It can also serve to endow the film with an immediate, realistic edge, the veneer of grit and improvisation. Cynics might also add that action sequences filmed this way allow directors to avoid elegant choreography. But director Gary Ross uses a shaky camera for more expressive ends. True, he conceals his more violent moments underneath a panic of fast edits, kinetic camera swerves, flashes of light, and creative angles, and this lets him get away with a PG-13 rating. He also manages to skirt having to properly direct a scene of mass revolt mid-film, with all the complicated movements of extras that implies. An insurrection in one of the districts is summarized by a series of succinct and increasingly unintelligible takes of chaos, flung fists, broken glass, and anti-riot police. By that point, the film’s aesthetic has justified the jumbled collage.
True, he conceals his more violent moments underneath a panic of fast edits, kinetic camera swerves, flashes of light, and creative angles, and this lets him get away with a PG-13 rating.
Yet the shaky camera also features in quieter occasions. We lose clarity, but the characters are likewise impaired. The use of shallow focus here also reminds of art-house fare, like Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl or Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, where the in-focus characters seem detached from their out-of-focus environment, as if they were superimposed over a foreign world, which is either hostile or completely alien to their interests and passions. Still, as lost as the protagonists of The Hunger Games might be in the gilded utopia of Panem, they cannot afford to ignore the perils of their surroundings. Unlike the introspective youngsters of Martel and Alfredson, Katniss is obliged to make sense of what is out-of-focus. As if she had fainted and woken up in an unknown room, she rises from the stupor of her country-girl whiplash and, underneath the spotlight of the crass talk show, invents a confident young woman for the entertainment of her stimulus-thirsty viewers.
The Hunger Games is not radical or innovate, and even its most expressive twists cannot really compare to the aforementioned. Its duties as mainstream commercial moviemaking don’t allow its flourishes to last, and it is even aesthetically inconsistent. We see how the disorienting camera functions in moments of doubt and confusion, but why does it also shake at the beginning, when Katniss strolls in the secure embrace of her own land? Elsewhere, the script lacquers the narrative with strident caricatures. Panem folk are fanciful clowns, decked in elaborate rainbow clothes, like eighteenth-century rock stars covered in the artificial cocoon of cosmetics and splashy fabric. Katniss leaves behind a useless boyfriend back home, who is given little more to do than look emasculated as his former girl warms up to Peeta (though his role should be more prominent in the inevitable sequel). And most of the 24 contestants have only their death to offer, their personalities missing from the start.
Its duties as mainstream commercial moviemaking don’t allow its flourishes to last, and it is even aesthetically inconsistent. We see how the disorienting camera functions in moments of doubt and confusion, but why does it also shake at the beginning, when Katniss strolls in the secure embrace of her own land?
All that aside, Gary Ross shows tact in how he tells his story. As in the later installments of the Harry Potter saga, there is a sense of gravity and underlying seriousness. From the performances to the setting, the film respects its source material and its readers (like Harry Potter and Twilight, The Hunger Games is based on a teen literature hit). Jennifer Lawrence, as Katniss, fits her character precisely, a sturdy beauty, hardened, tough, and feminine. She plays a girl who lost her father at an early age and was forced to care for her grieving mother and younger sister. This sudden growing up - which has aged her beyond her years - whispers from the bottom of Lawrence’s eyes. Josh Hutcherson, as Peeta, is only adequate in comparison, while Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, and Donald Sutherland all have enjoyable turns, if of limited range, as the grandiloquent talk show host, the drunk but ultimately dependable trainer who advises Katniss, and the Machiavellian president of Panem, respectively. Lawrence overshadows them all.
Instead of simplifying the human dimensions of the drama, The Hunger Games highlights them amidst the scars of the battlefield, a logic also reflected in the use of the already discussed shaky cam. What matters are not the particulars of how bodies move across a landscape - the dance of kinetic action - but the anxious, wild fear that dominates Katniss and the rest. How could they possibly apprehend their surroundings? Most of them are not fighters. They are disconcerted and only see the fuzzy outlines of random violence. An action scene by James Cameron, by contrast, displays a strong grasp of space, because his characters possess it themselves: the frightened but brave Ripley of Aliens, the hulking Terminator. Cameron’s camera is almost never jittery. It glides, draws architectural or geographical blueprints. Here, on the other hand, the protagonists are mere adolescents dreaming of survival. What mental blueprint can they draw?
While the contestants die on television, the citizens of Panem delight in the savagery they witness from a distance. The message is heavy-handed, but poignant. In the real world, hundreds of thousands of young upstarts from around the globe sacrifice their bodies at the altar of sports and spectacle. Football players suffer spine lesions and head trauma. Some lose their memory. Others die young and, after autopsy, are found to have the brains of old men. Kids mired in poverty play soccer as a business venture or as an escape route into economic stability. Their parents do everything possible to ensure their success and, already in the youth leagues, the kids must contend with rough play, because every one of their peers is gambling on his own future. Some make it big, most never succeed. Even those who rise to first division might only snatch a few minutes on the field, until they fumble a ball and hear the condemning response from the crowd, which ignores utterly the struggle and sweat the fumbler had to overcome before even stepping on the pitch. The communal voice from the stands demands victory, and the players overexert their bodies. Many are injured, and there are those who leave their careers behind in recovery. Extreme examples, perhaps. But as players are insulted and overanalyzed to professional death by spectators who feel entitled to do so, one wonders if the latter don’t view the former as they would animals racing around a ring, or gladiators murdering each other on a sandy circle. Panem is a future of technological leaps but archaic values. Its television viewers have, morally, reverted back to the Roman Coliseum.
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