MY MOVIE SHELF: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 50 Days to go: 36

Movie #390:  The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1

If you’d asked me when I first read Mockingjay whether it would require two movies to tell its story, I would’ve answered emphatically no. This is not Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a nearly 800-page book chock full of events critical to the end of the series. Mockingjay is half that size, and its narrator Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is holed up in the underground bunkers of District 13, away from most of the action, for the vast majority of it. If you take simply the first half, there’s even less going on and fewer events for Katniss to be involved in. It’s problematic, to say the least. Obviously I haven’t seen Mockingjay Part 2 yet — it doesn’t come out for six more months — but based on this first half I’ve turned my opinion around on splitting the final installment in two, not because of everything that’s in the book, but because of everything the film has added to it and enhanced.

First and foremost, Katniss is nearly insane in District 13. The terror of her two Games, the disorienting way she was removed from the last one, the haunting knowledge that Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is in the hands of the Capitol being tortured or worse, the multiple injuries she’s sustained, and the recent knowledge that all of District 12 has been leveled, all combine to make Katniss as raw as an exposed nerve. But when your character is astute enough to narrate her story and articulate her madness, it loses its effectiveness a bit. On film, however, that restrictive quality falls away and Lawrence is able to put every ounce of her award-winning talent behind all the fear, pain, madness, anger and desperation Katniss feels. It puts actual walls around her too, and seeing the tiny, hidden spaces Katniss seeks out for refuge brings her panic attacks and frenzied insecurities into sharp focus.

The addition of actual visuals also benefit the destruction wrought by the Capitol. The annihilation of District 12 is especially poignant. The book talks of buildings turned to rubble, and a mass grave in the Meadow, but the film shows us the charred skeletons of fleeing people, and combines it with the first-person account of Gale (Liam Hemsworth). It’s infinitely more powerful and more effective, as is Katniss’s performance of “The Hanging Tree.” (A book can tell you something is a song, but the melody in the film really brings it to life.)

Mockingjay Part 1 also really showcases the role of television and propaganda in the world of Panem in a way none of the movies have been able to do yet (and frankly better than the book does as well). Natalie Dormer makes everything better (seriously, if she and Anthony Mackie were in a movie together, it might bring about world peace and everlasting love and harmony), and that includes her role as director Cressida here, in which she honestly conveys not only the journalistic and entertainment instincts of the film she’s shooting, but an artistic eye and an interviewer’s questions. She’s savvy and smart, and while you sense she’s personally invested, it’s also clear she knows exactly what she’s doing and how to best send a message. (Philip Seymour Hoffman brings this same publicity-savvy sensibility as Plutarch, but in a more conceptual, less hands-on way.)

In general, the film simply brings so much more of the conflict to life, as it expands the world far beyond the reaches of just Katniss and her experience. There are powerful and jarring scenes in the districts themselves, with other citizens fighting the Peacekeepers. The scene of the rebels’ rescue of the captured tributes in the Capitol plays out with a heightened sense of tension because we watch Katniss breathlessly follow the action over security cameras, and it culminates in a foreboding interaction directly with President Snow (Donald Sutherland) that the book lacks. But the most improved aspect comes from the performance of Hutcherson, as we watch Peeta grow increasingly emaciated over the course of several television interviews with Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), and then turn into a raging, psychotic madman once he and Katniss are reunited. It is shocking and disturbing and exactly what the film needed to convey just how terrifying a transformation he’s made, and how much of a threat he is to Katniss — a girl he’s only ever been loving and protective toward before now. It sets up the sequel beautifully, and I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

 

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 51 Days to go: 36

Movie #389:  The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

No movie will ever be a perfect adaptation of a book. It isn’t possible. Yet Catching Fire is one of the best ever, and easily the best of The Hunger Games franchise. (Mockingjay Part 2 is, of course, not out yet, but since it’s only half the story and Mockingjay itself was the worst book of the series, it’s safe to crown Catching Fire early.) While certain scenarios are altered or streamlined and others are missing altogether, the movie nevertheless captures the tone and spirit of the second book perfectly. And Jennifer Lawrence, having won her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook just nine months prior, returns as Katniss with a killer, deeper, more nuanced and fuller performance. For something that could be dubbed as “only” an action franchise based on “only” a YA lit phenomenon, Lawrence doesn’t phone in a bit of it. Just that closing image, in fact, of Katniss lying on an examination table in the heretofore unknown District 13, her face transforming from despair to anger to grim resolve, is practically a professional acting clinic. She’s incredible.

Beyond Lawrence’s performance, though, I also love the character of Katniss herself. She’s angrier on one hand, more frightened on the other, and more overwhelmed than ever by the enormous weight on her shoulders and the impossible decisions that lie before her. But she’s still a teenager too, and she’s still caught between feelings for Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and feelings for Gale (Liam Hemsworth), and blessedly, the film lets her articulate that. She’s able to have a conversation with Gale in which she says flat-out that there’s no room in her life for feelings of romance because of the threats leveled against her. That’s a stance people aren’t regularly allowed to take in films. Even people who claim to be off the market or not interested in dating are often immediately thrust into a romantic meet-cute or some such nonsense. But real people are sometimes legitimately not capable of fitting romance into their lives, and it’s important that Katniss be afforded that option. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel love — indeed, Katniss loves and cares about many people around her — but at this point the outlet for that love is a need to protect them.

Another young woman allowed to forsake sentimentality in Catching Fire is Johanna Mason (Jena Malone). After years of abuse at the hands of the Capitol, Johanna succinctly sums up her situation with regard to President Snow (Donald Sutherland): “He can’t hurt me. There’s no one left that I love.” (This will come, in Mockingjay, to refer only to being hurt by the screams of these particular jabberjays, but the statement is true as she says it.) She’s known love, but has had it (literally or figuratively, somehow) beaten out of her, and now her response to it — in particular to the hypersexualized Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) being actually in love with a fragile young woman from his District — is, “Love is weird.” She has no real use for it either. Johanna is a character allowed to be openly angry, to be hateful and sexual and deadly. I love her a lot. And Jena Malone gives her everything to bring that rage and volatility to life. It was seeing Catching Fire that brought me fully around to admitting I’m a Jena Malone fan, and I make no apologies for that. She is fierce and fabulous, just like Johanna.

As expected, production values go way up for Catching Fire from what they were in The Hunger Games (not that they were particularly low before, but the difference is obvious). Katniss, armed with the income of a Victor, now has a much richer — if still serviceable, at least in the Districts — wardrobe, but it’s with Effie (Elizabeth Banks) that the costume budget is really put to good use. Her butterfly ensemble at the reaping for the Quarter Quell is a work of delicate, beautiful art. (And Katniss’s wedding dress is nothing to sneeze at either.) CGI effects have been ramped up as well, as we see Katniss fighting digital holograms in her archery training session and it is every bit as impressive to the audience as it is to the other Victors. The work on the force field is also impressive, and the baboon mutts in Catching Fire are far scarier and better rendered than the dog ones in the first film (though, to be fair, the dog mutts in The Hunger Games film weren’t nearly as scary as their description in the book).

Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) gets to expand himself a bit in this one as well, being cagey and enigmatic while also being the voice of reason with regard to the relationship train Katniss and Peeta are on now. And his fear and desperation at the realization that his name is eligible for the Third Quarter Quell reaping is palpable. Of course, I would’ve liked to see a scene in which Peeta and Katniss watch Haymitch’s Games, the Second Quarter Quell, though thankfully YouTube is capable of scratching that particular itch if you want it to. (I like this one.) Aside from that small wish, though, Catching Fire is really exceptionally well-done. They even recast Buttercup as an acceptable cat. And I think we can all agree how important that was.

Next we see how to make a good movie out of a somewhat middling book as Katniss becomes the Mockingjay.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Hunger Games

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 52 Days to go: 36

Movie #388:  The Hunger Games

A Kindle is a wonderful thing to have when you’re nursing. You can hold it with one hand, change pages with a slight tap of your thumb, and not move for sometimes hours — especially if the baby in question likes to snooze while she eats. My daughter was born in the first quarter of 2012, and I used nursing time (and later, breast pump time) to do a LOT of reading.

One of the books I downloaded was The Hunger Games. The movie was releasing soon, and people were in a frenzy over it — over Jennifer Lawrence being cast as olive-skinned teenager Katniss, over the burning controversy of Team Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) or Team Gale (Liam Hemsworth), over its very existence — and I decided I should read the thing. That was an exceptionally good call on my part, I think. I would up reading the entire series (because The Hunger Games is really more the first volume for a story than the complete story) in a matter of days, and I’ve read it multiple times since. The whole thing, basically any time I get bored with whatever else I’m reading.

I felt prepared going in to the film, therefore. I felt well-versed in Katniss’s psyche, I had strong opinions on Peeta and Gale, and I’d cried huge sloppy tears when I read the part where Rue (Amandla Stenberg) died. I was ready. And for the most part, I was pleased with the final product. The Hunger Games is an adequate book-to-film adaptation. I wasn’t upset like those idiots crying foul at Rue and Thresh (Dayo Okeniyi) being black (I wouldn’t have been upset anyway, because why does it matter, but they are clearly not white in the book, so those people crying foul are even more ridiculous and awful than normal bigots) (I may be a cat bigot though, because I was seriously perturbed that Buttercup wasn’t remotely yellow — WHO WOULD NAME A BLACK AND WHITE CAT BUTTERCUP???), I thought Jennifer Lawrence did a great job, and for a narrative that takes place entirely in Katniss’s mind, the movie did fairly well bringing some of that out into dialogue and action. I wish Peeta had been taller, but honestly I bet Josh Hutcherson wishes that from time to time himself. (I wish Harry Potter was taller too. It’s just one of those things.) Mostly my complaints were small, though, and had to do with ways in which the story was conveyed on film that didn’t match the way they happened in the book, and that undermined specific emotional notes the story was trying to tell.

The one that struck me most pointedly was the point where Claudius (Toby Jones) announces that two victors will be crowned if the last two standing are from the same district. In the book, this gets a spontaneous shriek of Peeta’s name by Katniss, followed by the instantaneous and terrifying thought that she may have just given up her position. She’s being hunted, after all. But it perfectly expressed how much he’d been on her mind, and how much she cared for him (in her stilted, closed-off way) and was avoiding him for the sake of not having to fight him. In the movie, however, this moment comes as a calculated whisper. Katniss is not acting out of emotion but more out of the strategic advantage of having an ally, of putting on a good show, and it will lead her directly into the notion of pretending to love Peeta in order to get sponsorships. It’s a much more cold-hearted approach to Katniss, and one I don’t entirely approve of. Even if Katniss believes and tells herself that her affection for Peeta is all for show, it’s not entirely true in her heart, and in the book that’s quite clear. The somewhat flatter way movies have at their disposal to tell stories, however, makes it very difficult to convey those many layers of emotion and internal conflict, so you’re left with a somewhat unjustly characterized Katniss.

The other instance when this occurs is earlier in the film, when Peeta and Katniss are riding into the Capitol on their chariot for the Tributes Parade. In the scene, Katniss wrenches her hand away from Peeta when he grabs for it, and he convinces her that it would be a good publicity move. Once again, this undercuts the actual emotions of these two characters. In the book it is Katniss, not Peeta, who reaches for the other’s hand. And it’s not in order to look good to the masses, but out of fear and desperation. She needs something to hold onto. It’s indicative of real feelings of connection — even as confusing and muddled as they are for Katniss throughout the series — and vulnerability that are vital to the growth of both characters over the course of the franchise. Katniss reaches for Peeta for protection and security, and he will become a rock for her in many ways that Gale, with his thirst for action and retribution, is not. The moment also makes Peeta far more calculating than he’s ever portrayed in the books, almost as if he doesn’t truly love her but is encouraging her to play a part. Even with Peeta’s masterful strategic manipulation of certain parts of the Games (interviews with Caesar (Stanley Tucci) in particular, but also his early alliance with the Careers), his feelings for Katniss were always sincerely, truly felt, and it feels cheap to take away from it here.

That being said, most of the rest of the movie was a satisfying depiction of a book so many people loved. Elizabeth Banks plays beautifully against type as the uptight, persnickety, procedure-obsessed Effie, and Woody Harrelson is an excellent Haymitch, equal parts slobbering drunk and whip-smart survivor. And Catching Fire is one of the best adaptations of a book yet, so I kind of can’t wait to watch it again. On to the next!