I have always found Manohla Dargis' reviews worthwhile reading especially for something as ubiquitous and over-hyped as The Hunger Games. The hoopla is mystifying for those like me who are not in the target market, haven't read the books and don't find a story about young teens killing each other for sport very appealing. I am told that the independence, strength and loyalty of the female lead are what make her and the series attractive to young females -- and those are certainly admirable traits -- but then why set her in a violent nihilistic world? I am a bit uncomfortable that it is targeted at impressionable teens and young adults and worried about how it may affect the way they value life and may desensitize them towards violence. Nevertheless I am intrigued enough by its success that even with Dargis' lukewarm review I may check it out to have a better informed opinion.
Movie Review
The Fight of Her Life
‘The Hunger Games’ Movie Adapts the Suzanne Collins Novel
Murray Close/Lionsgate
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in "The Hunger Games."
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 22, 2012
There’s a short anxious scene in the new film “The Hunger Games,” when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence),
races through a deep, dark forest, falls down a hill and rolls and
rolls only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown.
Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy
turned rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a
postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. When she runs through
that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American
frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed.
For as long as this brief scene lasts it
seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly
ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the
heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s “Last of the Mohicans” if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Alas, Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments “Pleasantville” and “Seabiscuit,” and whose script credits include “Big,”
has a way of smoothing even modestly irregular edges. Katniss, who for
years has bagged game to keep her family from starving, was created for
rough stuff — for beating the odds and the state, for hunting squirrel
and people both — far rougher than Mr. Ross often seems comfortable
with, perhaps because of disposition, inclination or some
behind-the-scenes executive mandate.
It may be that Mr. Ross is too nice a guy
for a hard case like Katniss. A brilliant, possibly historic creation —
stripped of sentimentality and psychosexual ornamentation, armed with
Diana’s bow and a ferocious will — Katniss is a new female warrior and
she keeps you watching even while you’re hoping for something better the
next time around. (Mr. Ross is onboard to direct the follow-up,
“Catching Fire.”) For some fans of the trilogy, the screen version will
inevitably be disappointing, especially for those keeping inventory of
the details, characters, grim thoughts and cynicism that have gone
missing. For others, the image of a girl like Katniss taking up so much
screen space with so few smiles may be enough to keep faith.
The screenplay by Mr. Ross, Ms. Collins and
Billy Ray hews dutifully close to its source material, at least in wide
strokes. Katniss lives in District 12 of Panem — as in panem et circenses,
Latin for bread and circuses — a totalitarian state that has risen from
the postwar ashes of North America. Every year a boy and a girl ages 12
to 18 are chosen from each Panem district to compete in the
gladiatorial games of the title, a fight that owes something to that
ancient Roman blood sport and something else to the Greek myth of the
Minotaur, the part-man, part-bull that devoured Athenian youths given in
tribute. The Minotaur is eventually slain, but that’s getting ahead of
Katniss.
The film takes off at the selection
ceremony, or reaping, a nationally televised event complete with armed
soldiers and a bubbly bubblehead M.C. (Elizabeth Banks),
during which Katniss’s younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields), is
chosen. Katniss quickly volunteers to take Prim’s place, becoming, with
Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), District 12’s tributes. The two are whisked off
to the Capitol, where they’re plucked and primped by a team of gaudily
hued stylists (overseen by a gilt-lidded Lenny Kravitz as Cinna), a
potentially razor-sharp sequence that should underscore the Capitol’s
decadence but here comes across as a variant on Dorothy’s cheery wash- and brush-up when she enters the Emerald City. Katniss may not be in Kansas, but neither does she seem in palpable danger.
That changes once she and Peeta are
transported to the outdoor arena where, with wits and weapons, they
battle the other tributes and assorted perils generated by the
gamemakers (including a dandified Wes Bentley),
who dole out death via computer touch screen. There, in a rapidly cut
massacre that pits boy against girl and finds youngsters killing and
falling and dying in a frantic, fragmented blur, Mr. Ross and his
editors, Stephen Mirrione and Juliette Welfling, set the stage and stark
mood. For her part, Katniss, though frozen in fear, follows the advice
of her and Peeta’s mentor, Haymitch (an overly cute Woody Harrelson),
and runs in the opposite direction. It’s a strong, visceral scene that
quickens the pace and pulse, and distills the story’s horror — suffer
the little children to enter the arena — in blunt visual terms.
Nothing else in the arena comes close to
that initial fight in its sheer primal impact. Working with Tom Stern,
Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Mr. Ross tries to find
mystery in the forest, in its canopy of trees and thick undergrowth, but
never locates a deeper dread, despite the computer-generated fireballs
and hounds, and especially the other tributes. Part of what makes the
“Hunger Games” books so effective is that they literalize the familiar
drama of adolescence, translating the emotional assaults, peer pressure,
cliques and the tortured rest into warfare. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
did the same on television, except there the villains were supernatural
demons. In “The Hunger Games,” the real enemies are adults, including,
of course, the parents catching the show on TV.
Fans of the Japanese cult film “Battle Royale”
may see some overlap with its allegory about juvenile delinquents sent
to an island to fight to the death, and others may be reminded of Orson
Scott Card’s science-fiction novel “Ender’s Game,” about children trained to battle an alien species. If you’ve seen the pint-size assassins in the recent action flicks “Kick-Ass” and “Hanna,”
which feature prepubescent girls who lock, load and shoot without
batting a lash, you may think you’ve also seen it before. You haven’t,
not really. Although the girls in those movies are vaguely sexualized,
their age exempts them from the narrative burdens of heterosexual
romance: They don’t have to bat those lashes at the boys and they don’t
need to be saved by them either, as in the “Twilight” series.
What invests Katniss with such exciting
promise and keeps you rapt even when the film proves less than equally
thrilling is that she also doesn’t need saving, even if she’s at an age
when, most movies still insist, women go weak at the knees and whimper
and weep while waiting to be saved. Again and again Katniss rescues
herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that
makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross’s soft touch and Ms.
Lawrence’s bland performance. One look at District 12, which Mr. Ross
conceives as a picturesque old-timey town — filled with withered Dorothea Lange types in what was once Appalachia — and it’s clear that someone here was enthralled with the actress’s breakout turn in “Winter’s Bone” as a willful, resilient child of the Ozarks.
A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have
looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 20, her seductive,
womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people
starved into submission. The graver problem is a disengaged performance
that rarely suggests the terrors Katniss faces, including the fatalism
that originally hangs on her like a shroud. What finally saves the
character and film both is the image of her on the run, moving
relentlessly forward. Unlike those American Adams who have long embodied
the national character with their reserves of hope, innocence and
optimism, Katniss springs from someplace else, a place in which an
American Eve, battered, bruised and deeply knowing, scrambles through a
garden not of her making on her way to a new world.
“The Hunger Games” is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Brutal child-on-child violence and death.
