THE phenomenal success of Suzanne Collins’s “The
Hunger Games”, the first part of a bestselling dystopian trilogy for teenagers
(and others), made a film adaptation a near certainty. But this posed a
problem: what defines and underpins the horrific nature of this imagined
society is that its citizens take pleasure in watching young people fight to
the death on broadcast television (ie, the so-called Hunger Games). Yet this is
disturbingly close to taking pleasure in watching young people fight to the
death on screen, which is what the film audience of "The Hunger
Games" presumably needs to do. How can such a film divorce the thrills it
delivers from the fictional thrill-making that it has to deplore?
The most obvious solution hits the audience pretty
early on: an overdone devotion to shaky-cam techniques, quick cuts and fairly
extreme close-ups. Gary Ross, the director, clearly intends to immerse and
disorient his audience, to ensure we feel rather different from the audience
within the film. They see a polished version of the Hunger Games, edited and
packaged; we, these camera techniques assure us, are seeing things from the
oppressed inside.
The plot also helps. At the beginning of the actual
games about a third of the characters are killed. Removing them allows the film
to have basically a set of good guys and bad guys, rather than a full moral
spectrum. By depicting this murderous culling as a montage, the film creates
another distinction between cinema viewers and the audience within: we perceive
the event as a loss, whereas they take it as a thrill.
The film, like the books, also plays up the outlandish
appearance of that in-film audience. This not only leads to what must surely be
the longest-ever list of hairstylists in a film's closing credits, it also
helps to ensure that we never identify with the in-film audience. While the
logic of the film demands that many in both audiences are rooting for Katniss
Everdene, the story's hero (played in the film by Jennifer Lawrence), we never
really see such support on screen. Essentially, “The Hunger Games” never wants
to be confused with Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games”, which directly confronts
the titillating, sadistic thrill of watching violence in film.
The only character who goes some way towards crossing
this divide is Caesar Flickerman, the TV presenter of the Games, played by the
reliably wonderful Stanley Tucci (pictured). Because he must explain what is
going on to both audiences, he is the hinge between them. And his performance
is a gem; he is clearly a monster of cruelty who is remarkably good at his
television job.
But the performance that defines the film is Ms
Lawrence's. By refusing to be likeable (for the most part), she rejects the
affections of the in-show audience but firmly wins ours. Katniss Everdene is a
terrific character, brave and decent but also forced by circumstance to be
disingenuous and indeed hurtful to some who love her. She is self-critical and
confused yet thoroughly admirable. In her books, Ms Collins is able to show
this by entering Katniss's head. Ms Lawrence remarkably manages to illustrate
this complexity in a near-silent performance.
And the best may be yet to come. In the first of Ms
Collins’s books Katniss’s narration performs very well the function that Mr
Ross tries to fulfil with shaky-cams and the like—putting us in her world as
she sees it. Later on this unique perspective becomes a shackle, as the story
needs to grow beyond her. The film's sequels should let Ms Lawrence’s
performance grow, too, if the screenplays allow it. The books tail off from the
first, and the films may well do likewise. But there is a possibility that,
over four films, Jennifer Lawrence’s already impressive performance will grow
into something great.
