Based upon the novel by Suzanne Collins
Screenplay Written by Simon Beufoy and Michael deBruyn
Directed by Francis Lawrence
**** (four stars)
If there was a way to profit handsomely through the politics of peace, what a richer world we would be.
As much as I love the sheer fantasy and escapism of science fiction films and adventures, and I always will, sometimes the very best science fiction, fantasy or action adventures films are the types that fully transcend their genres and boldly hold a mirror up to our current society. The films that force all of us to think about the world in which we all co-exist, yet are presented in a fashion that is undeniably entertaining, creatively inventive, eye-popping and story driven as opposed to just functioning as a diatribe. With films like Director Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" (2008) and "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012) plus this year's propulsively brutal "Elysium" from Writer/Director Neill Blomkamp, we explored our turbulent and increasingly precarious social/economic/political structure and landscape through the respective lenses of comic book heroes and gritty sci-fi. Where all of those films worked as parables, it could be argued that all of those films also serve as a series of passionate call to arms for all of us sitting in those movie theater seats to wake up and pay strict attention to the actions of the real world powers-that-be and how those actions affect our world.
Last year, I awarded four stars to "The Hunger Games," Director Gary Ross' intensely riveting adaptation of Suzanne Collins' blockbuster young adult science fiction novel. At this time, I am excited to announce that "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," the second installment in the four part film series, and now directed by Francis Lawrence, is even better. "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is not only a superior piece of entertainment and one of the only event films of 2013 to hit the bullseye, the film is also a powerfully provocative and brazenly grim political statement that takes deadly aim at the politics of war and fear, the subjugation of a nation by the powerful few, and even the soul crushing universe of so called "reality" television and our culture's never ending and still growing obsession with any and all kinds of fame. Certainly all of those themes are prevalent in Collins' original novel, but after reading two books in her trilogy, I just feel that her awkward and sometimes wooden prose kept me at an arms length distance when I should have been enveloped and enraged. So, believe it or not, here is an instance where I think that the film versions are even better than the novels, as they not only honor Collins' original vision but also elevate it. With regards to "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," Francis Lawrence has delivered a masterfully helmed film, one that powerfully exceeded my already high expectations as it gives us a dark and dystopian future vision that is uncomfortably and disturbingly very present...if only we are paying attention.
As with the novel, "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" begins shortly after the events of the first installment as Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has survived the carnage of the 74th annual Hunger Games, a government ruled and live televised event in which teenagers are forced to complete and fight each other to the death, through her quick thinking and has also saved the life of fellow "tribute" Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) while in the battle arena. Both Katniss and Peeta have convinced the entire viewing public of their otherwise manufactured "star crossed romance," a passionate love that fueled their simultaneous shocking acts of rebellious political insubordination and television ratings euphoria.
Unfortunately, and on a more inter-personal front, the "love affair" has wounded both the hearts of the unrequited Peeta as well as her most trusted friend Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth). But on a larger scale and most crucially, an unconvinced President Coriolanus Snow (a terrifically sinister Donald Sutherland) makes a personal visit to Katniss' home to warn her that she and Peeta must properly convince the public and indeed himself of their supposed romance while on their victory tour of the country, or else risk the collective fates of her family, friends, District and all of its inhabitants.
While on tour, and reunited with their team, which includes veteran Hunger Games victor and alcoholic mentor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrleson), fashion designer Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) and the plastically glam and grotesquely unctuous Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), Katniss and Peeta become firsthand witnesses in viewing how their televised act of rebellion has planted the seeds of revolution against the government of Panem, resulting in increasing acts of violence against the people by the ironically named Peacekeeper soldiers.
To squash the building uprising and to ensure further retribution against the masses, President Snow announces that the 75th annual Hunger Games would in fact be a special version of the event entitled the Quarter Quell, which is held every 25 years and in which all contestants would be selected from the pool of surviving Hunger Games victors--thus meaning Katniss and Peeta may be forced to fight for their lives on live television all over again.
Francis Lawrence's "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is a richer, deeper, broader experience than its predecessor. As with the previous installment, all of the actors rise to the occasion and inhabit their roles impressively and with gravitas. Woody Harrleson has only eased into his role even more comfortably, and has also begun to show the layers beneath his drunkenly sardonic personality, allowing us to see shadows of the Hunger Games horrors that rest too closely behind his eyes. As Effie Trinket, Elizabeth Banks also begins to show signs of her distaste of the very system that has lavished her but could turn on her in an instant. As Hunger Games television host Caesar Flickerman, Stanley Tucci continues to provide his savagely wicked parody of those vacuous MCs that litter our television screens ad nauseum. And what a welcome sight it was to add Jefferey Wright, Amanda Plummer, and a ferocious Jena Malone to the cast as a collective of veteran tributes forced to return to the Hunger Games as well as the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman as new game maker Plutarch Heavensbee, who harbors a deeper agenda of his own.
Again, the sensational Jennifer Lawrence (no relation to the Director) shows why she is not only the perfect actress to portray Katniss Everdeen but that she is only the real deal who truly deserves all of the critical attention she has received. Through her sheer physicality combined with her passionate performance, Jennifer Lawrence brings Katniss into full three dimensional life in a way that I really do not believe she is represented on the page in the source material. Where the film was riveted on her perspective in the first film, Jennifer Lawrence wisely allows her fellow actors to take center stage, because even though Katniss remains our main protagonist, the world in which she exists and her (as well as our) perceptions of the world of the suffering Districts, their respective populations and how the seeds of rebellion are planted have only grown. Unlike that insipid Bella Swan from Twilight, Katniss increasingly realizes that while she is the catalyst for the events that transpire in this second chapter, everything is not always about her and that newfound sense of social/political/economic inter-connectivity makes "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" more propulsive and more thought provoking than it ever needed to be...a quality I deeply appreciated.
"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is a film that is so confident with its abilities to juggle a variety of purposeful themes and concepts in a completely clear eyed and complex manner. Lawrence always maintains the film's brilliant ability of keeping the moral core of the story front and center, ensuring the action sequences within the Quarter Quell contain the proper levels of terror, insanity, sorrow, sacrifice, survival and the desperation of trying to keep control of one's humanity in an entirely inhumane environment. With "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," you get your politics with your popcorn and then some!
First of all, it is a film that explores our relationship with violence in regards to our simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards it and most impressively, Francis Lawrence creates an atmosphere in which we in the theater audience are as complicit as the home viewers of the Hunger Games in the film itself.. Lawrence understands that in both the fictional and real worlds, the Hunger Games are precisely what we have all come to witness, even knowing the inhumane brutality of the experience. Lawrence toys with that very stage of anticipation as the events of the Quarter Quell do not arrive in the film for over an hour and when they do, they are equally impressive and terrifying to behold indeed. Lawrence stages and executes the Quarter Quell sections of the film with the proper amount of intensity and solemnity (and all WITHOUT the dreaded "shaky-cam"), allowing the power of filmmaking inventiveness and suggestion carry the day instead of drowning us in actual gore. It has been surprising to me to hear from some people that they felt the film was essentially not violent enough! Despite the fact that the filmmakers are not about to make an R rated film from a young adult novel, I do find it to be an odd criticism considering what these stories are about. But, that criticism, in and of itself, is completely indicative of the concepts Lawrence immerses us deeply inside of, forcing us to really think about what our individual relationships with violence actually happen to be.
Even beyond the actual games, our reactions towards Katniss and the variety of tributes are designed to mirror those of the audience in the fictional world. For example, when Katniss debuts her new fashion creation on live television, the very one that reveals itself to be a representative symbol of the uprising to come, both real and imaginary audiences are meant to be awed by the beauty and special effects as well as become newly and...ahem...hungrily inspired to rise for revolutionary change.
But then, and as I previously stated, Francis Lawrence cleverly makes us complicit with that very fictional audience in regards to how we continuously crave, consume and become anesthetized by the very things we all know are false and harmful yet continue to do so to keep ourselves distracted from the true horrors of the world in which we co-exist. What are Caesar Flickerman's sickeningly opulent televised spectacles but versions of almost every single sickeningly opulent spectacle that we can find on the E!, Style, Esquire, Bravo, A&E, Lifetime and major networks. Flickerman's programs would be a fun-house mirror version of what we expose ourselves to if only the soullessness was not so right on! The monster always needs to be fed and said monsters are voluminous, ever shifting and always ravenous, and sometimes as close as actually existing inside of our own skins. We are all involved as participants, whether we realize it or not.
Certainly our endlessly insatiable obsession with all things that glitter in the media, no matter how desperate and no matter how much we already know how terrible it all is, exists as a substance that serves our societal monster. We can just change the channel or turn it off completely, but we are not doing it, so we only have ourselves to blame. But "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" wants us to widen our canvas by looking outwards into our communities and nation at large and think seriously about the ways our own leaders are utilizing the monster of fear to silence us, keeping us "doped with religion and sex and TV," as John Lennon once sang.
Through the wider conceptual lens Lawrence has placed in front of us, and with Katniss as our guide, "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is passionately urging us to think seriously about how the powers-that-be have rigged the system against the very people that they were elected to serve. How is it that the wheels of war continue to spin? How do the powers-that-be prey upon our sense of increased numbness, apathy and fear in order to keep us all subjugated? How are we used as political pawns by our leaders, just like how Katniss is used by the politicians and the revolutionaries, to justify their own desires? How is the news disseminated or more truthfully, not disseminated? Why do we live in an era when the public is more invested and motivated to vote for a television "reality" game show than in the very elections that could conceivably alter the very courses of their lives? How can one fight the power when we live in a such an Orwellian period when corporations are considered to be people, money constitutes speech, war equals peace, unprecedented levels of government spying on innocent citizens that is supposedly designed to "keep us safe," the stripping of voting rights to supposedly protect the sanctity of our electoral process, and the politicians who are crying out the loudest for smaller government would create and pass ideologically based laws that go as far as mandating trans-vaginal probes, for example?
Just this past Summer, in my own home base of Madison, Wisconsin, innocent civilians were being arrested for enacting their constitutionally protected 1st Amendment rights of protesting the policies of our Governor through...wait for it...singing songs in the State Capitol! These incidents included an 88 year old woman being handcuffed, a Mother and small child being arrested, a handcuffed war veteran being dropped down a flight of stairs by his arresting officers, the Editor of The Progressive magazine being arrested for simply reporting on the controversial events and even a young Black man being tackled to the ground by several over-zealous police officers and who was then arrested and detained in jail without any charges for several days thereafter. And was any of this reported on our local news stations? Very scantly, if at all, and only when one of those over-zealous police officers, one of our very own "Peacekeepers" was slightly injured. Look around, dear readers, this film seems to be imploring. Take a look at your own communities and home states and really view what your leaders are doing and decide if those aforementioned powers-that-be are working either for or against you. What will it take for people to become angry enough to demand change, accountability and even retribution? And conversely, why is it that when the words of truth to power are spoken, they often feel so empty and meaningless?
It is happening, whether in the fictional world of Panem or in the very real world we travel through every day. And as dire and sometimes as hopeless as it all seems (and sometimes is), there is indeed room for compassion. One more element that I thoroughly enjoyed about "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" was the concept of having surviving tributes being forced to return to the battle arena. While on the page, if memory serves, there was no real mention of racial makeup of the variety of characters who will forced to fight against Katniss and Peeta to the death. But, with film being a visual medium, Francis Lawrence, I felt, was very smart to have Suzanne Collins's characters exist in a variety of ages and races, making the plight of the games serve as a symbolic societal metaphor of how intertwined these characters, and all of us in the movie theater, truly are: We are all in this together. We rise and fall together.
That is the unquestionable power of Francis Lawrence's "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," a film, in its own way I think is actually not that terribly far removed from Director Steve McQueen's incendiary and poetic "12 Years A Slave," as the brutal odyssey of Katniss Everdeen requires us not think about what freedom, justice, fairness, friends and enemies, totalitarianism, revolution, survival, sacrifice and even what the act of living really means. And when an event movie can get the viewer to think alongside being superbly entertained, then that is greatness to me.
"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is one of 2013's very best films.
No comments:
Post a Comment