|
First, it was the custodians of the Harry Potter franchise choosing to split J.K.
Rowling’s final, ottoman-sized tome, The Deathly Hallows, into two separate
films. A year later, the Twilight folks followed suit. Then television execs
caught on, with AMC dividing the final seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men into
two calendar years apiece—a cleavage that made nonsensical both the words
“final” and “season.” Even though the second Avengers movie won’t be released
for another six months, we’ve already been informed that the final chapter of
the “trilogy” (another word getting stretched beyond recognition) will be doled
out in two installments. And please don’t get me started on Peter Jackson’s
rampant—and ongoing—Hobbit inflation.
Which is a long way of saying that the decision to split the final Hunger Games
novel—which
is not appreciably longer than the first two—into a pair of movies smacks of
imperatives more commercial than artistic. And yet, on the basis of The Hunger
Games: Mockingjay Part 1, it’s difficult to get too worked up about it. Is the
film a bit baggy in places? Sure. Might it have been better if they’d squeezed
the whole book into one movie? Probably. Nonetheless, Mockingjay Part 1 is a
fine entertainment, shot through with moments of surprising emotional impact.
The Hunger Games novels, by Suzanne Collins, went steadily downhill from the
first to the third. As a writer, she simply didn’t have the chops to carry her
story along as it became larger and more politically fraught. But the movies, at
least so far, have followed a more impressive trajectory. The second installment
was already weightier than the first, and in this outing the moral gravity has
been ratcheted up once more. The movie’s themes of rebellion and civil war are
inherently cinematic ones, and the filmmakers involved—returning director
Francis Lawrence and new screenwriters Danny Strong and Peter Craig—lend the
story a grim urgency largely lacking from the novel. Most crucial of all, of
course, is Jennifer Lawrence, who plays heroine Katniss Everdeen. Her Katniss-on-the-screen
is so much richer and more compelling than Collins’s Katniss-on-the-page that it
almost seems as though she’s playing another character altogether.
The movie begins with Katniss hospitalized and traumatized. Rescued from her
second Hunger
Games at the end of the last movie, she is now hidden away in the massive
underground bunker of District 13, the heart of the rebellion against the
nefarious Capitol. Alas, the love of her life, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson)
was not rescued with her, and Katniss is furious at his abandonment. She is also
furious that the leaders of the rebellion—the chilly President Alma Coin
(Julianne Moore) and her cherubic spinmeister Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip
Seymour Hoffman)—want to enlist her as a propaganda vehicle for their cause.
Eventually, though, she relents. As Heavensbee advises, “They’ll follow her.
She’s the face of the rebellion.”
At first this seems like a severe miscalculation, as the rebels’ efforts to
feature Katniss in a few in-studio propaganda videos (or “propos”) call to mind
nothing so much as ads for a third-tier congressional candidate. They have
better luck, however, when they take her on location, to another District
devastated by the Capitol. There, in what is probably Lawrence’s best scene, her
righteous anger is at last channeled toward a worthy cause. What follows is
largely a propo-war, in which the rebels broadcast on-the-ground videos of
Katniss and the Capitol counters with chat-show interviews with a suddenly
docile Peeta. (Has he been drugged? Tortured? Or is he playing a longer game?)
Mockingjay Part 1 is the darkest entrant in the series to date, visually as well
as tonally. Director Lawrence (no relation to his star) presents his somber
fable in shades of gray and
brown. No one is primping for parades in the Capitol this time out, nor modeling
incendiary eveningwear. Even reluctant rebel Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks)
must make do without her elaborate wigs—instead, she dons a Rosie-the-Riveter-esque
scarf—and marzipan wardrobe. (“Now I’m condemned to this life of jumpsuits,” she
complains.) The dispute between the Capitol and its outlying districts has moved
beyond its bread-and-circuses phase. And while Katniss’s image is still being
used for propaganda purposes, her persona is no longer the lovestruck tribute
but the combat-hardened veteran.
There are only a few battle sequences in the film, but they are deployed
effectively—in particular a brief uprising by workers in a forest and another
involving the bombing of a dam that uses a quasi-folk song sung by the Katniss
as the background score.
Moore is a strong addition to the cast as President Coin, her shock of white
hair suggesting that perhaps she is not quite so different from the Capitol’s
diabolical President Snow (Donald Sutherland) as we might hope. Indeed, with the
exception of Sutherland’s preening tyrant, the entire cast has dialed down the
hamminess of the earlier films, from Banks’s Effie to Stanley Tucci’s Caesar
Flickerman to Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch Abernathy. It’s as if they are all
following the lead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose understated performances in
this film and the prior one gave both a touch of class. In Mockingjay Part 1,
Hoffman tragically offers something else as well: a reminder, amid all the
make-believe carnage and heartbreak, of what genuine loss feels like.
|
