The banal story in a nutshell finds the world in some sort of dystopian future (I think -- though it could be some alternate universe time -- it's not really clear) where after a civil war, the country is divided into districts with a central capitol city, called Capitol City (because iron-fisted dictators know no poetry). For reasons that are unclear (outside of the intro title cards) each year the districts have to give up two teenagers to fight to the death in a reality TV show competition called "The Hunger Games". After some period of time, and with no rules explicitly spelled out, there will be a single winner left standing who will get rich for their success.
Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is an older sister and hard working hero from District 12, which is in coal country (somewhere in the Appalachians, it seems) and is squalid and poor. She volunteers for the competition, when her sister's name is drawn out of a hat in the lottery. She's whisked away to Capitol City where she's trained by some former champions and taught a bit about how the games work. Apparently rich viewers can sponsor competitors and give them gifts in the middle of the game; there is gambling involved at some level as well, though how the players would benefit from beating the odds is totally unclear.
Midway through the film, the actual games themselves begin, pitting Katniss against 23 mostly anonymous competitors. She has to survive and outwit her rivals -- and remain a symbol of moral purity along the way.
Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize Ross' direction, when many of the problems lie in the script (co-adapted by Collins, Ross and Billy Ray -- who has written some great stuff up to this point), which leaves out so many details, the only way to understand the movie is to cram with Wikipedia (or a female friend who has read to books) beforehand. There is so much suggested and not shown that the film really becomes a mere skeleton of what much be a richer tale. What we see on screen is an elliptical shorthand based on what one can only imagine as a rich trilogy of books. Ross doesn't really develop any characters -- not even Katniss -- but relies on one's love or hatred of them from the novels.
What is hinted at, but never really shown, is that Katniss is a perfect older sis and mother-figure constantly sacrificing herself for the greater good of her family. All we see is her performing a single selfless act (taking the place of her illfated sis) and scowling for the next 136 minutes. Lawrence's Katniss is almost totally unlovable and disconnected from any sense of naturalism. Why should I root for the nasty girl who seems to have a bad attitude and a bitter personality?
There's also a strange suggestion of a phantom love triangle that is presented, though not really shown either (I'm guessing it will play a bigger role in the remaining two movies), between Katniss, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is the other kid from District 12 to be selected for the Games, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), some boy who Katniss has a thing with back home... though that relationship is particularly abstract. Imagine Ingrid Berman (in Casablanca) trying to figure out if she wants to be with Bogey or Paul Henreid -- but then take Bogey off the screen, so it's only some weird, distant Rick who we really never know or see much of. It all falls apart.
The art of directing is much more than simply getting actors to speak their lines in a particular way (and in the case of this movie, that way is a bad, lifeless, emotionless way), but really comes in every camera angle and every cut. Taken for granted too frequently are the million decisions that go into every shot. This is not a film directed by Suzanne Collins (though she probably gave some help as to her vision) -- this is a film brought from the flat page to the visual screen by Gary Ross.
What we get is a pastiche of three styles of design, mostly art-deco (which is really 1920s futurism), with some '60s futurism (reminiscent of Truffaut's Farenheit 451) and then some '90s futurism (reminiscent of Besson's The Fifth Element). It's a lot of hodge-podge that doesn't seem to have any thematic correlations. It would be interesting if Ross could connect, say, the provinces being stuck in the '60s, while the capitol was in the '90s, but the style seems to change from moment to moment within any given location.
But then, when he gets a handful of opportunities to make a strong visual punctuation, Ross blows his chances. In the lead-in to the start of the Games, we see the district teams being interviewed by the emcee (played by Stanley Tucci with a lot of colorful hair, who is clearly a futuristic Ryan Seacrest), and Katniss blandly says that she can make her dress look like it's on fire (I guess she's known in the book as "the girl on fire," or something). So we see a close up of JenLaw's face, then a close up of the hem of her gown, then some fire on the hem, then she spins in a circle - but we can't really see much of anything because we're locked in a close up.
Ross is all too interested in close ups and, during the Games, handheld shots, making the movie almost impossible to understand. Everything bounces and shakes, faces are in the frame and then out, in focus and then out. It all feels very much like a bad home movie, more than a gigantic Hollywood blockbuster. Boxing in movies works in close up because there are only two men, they're standing and the topography of the ring is simple; wrestling on the ground in the woods is impossible to figure out in close up.
Back to the narrative, this is essentially a fun story, if mostly recycled. This is basically an update of Stephen King's (well, Richard Bachman's) "The Running Man" -- but girl-centric. But just because the girl is the lead, does not make it a feminist slanted story either (and no, I don't see Collins or Ross as suggesting a genre-twisting high camp feminist dialectic here). Katniss falls into the same dumb male-centric traps and tropes of heroines for generations. She's actively forced into a mother role (both in the glimpse of life before the Games and during the games), which she passively accepts, she's a femme fatale (at least she only agrees to not kill Peeta after castrating him metaphyically), she's unpredictable and sometimes irrational (in the context of her universe).
In this political area, the one thing that I was surprised by is the stark rightwing appeal of the story, the near-Randian, Objectivist qualities of it. You have a singular figure (she's so singular you really only get to know one or two other competitors to a much lesser degree, while the others are just bodies without subjectivity), who is put into a game where she can't rely on help from others, but has to do everything herself, rewriting her own metrics of self-interest as she goes along. Sounds like Howard Roark to me. This is the High Noon version of a survival story (a man alone), rather than the Rio Bravo version (man as part of a community). This is a conservative's wet dream, down to the embarrassment Katniss heaps on the central totalitarian government.
Again, not looking critically at the film as a document, but as mindless entertainment, this is a fun experience. The good guy (girl) wins and the bad guys lose. Yay! But as a film that has a specific point of view or exists as an artistic expression or presentation, it's ham-handed and laughable. Going into the film as a total rube, I can say I got almost nothing from it, aside from 'good triumphs over evil.' I don't think the burden of exploration and illumination should lay with me, but that it rests with the director and screenwriters. Here those people did a sub-mediocre job of basic storytelling and cinematic presentation.
Stars: .5 of 4
