'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1': Undernourished
 Popcorn Column
by Michael S. Goldberger
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Lionsgate
Panem votes for more action, less talk. |
Perhaps it's happened to you ... the feeling you get at a party given by folks you don't know very well, where it seems like everyone but you knows something — maybe a secret or some life philosophy, and you never got the memo. There are few more discomfiting circumstances than being wont to wonder, is it me or them that's amiss? But, admittedly dear reader, this is how director Francis Lawrence's "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1" taunts me and upends all that I thought I knew about film. I don't get it.
However, before rushing to psychoanalysis or to some storefront reader and adviser to discern just what it was in my upbringing that has so vexed my critical abilities, I'm hoping that by rummaging through the ins and out of this movie I'll find peace if not true epiphany. It can't just be that I'm not 14 and, oh the shame of it, haven't read one sentence of writer Suzanne Collins' lucrative phenomenon.
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I know contemporaries of sound mind and judgment who've taken the franchise to heart, absorbed every word of the trilogy, waited with baited breath for the release of each film, and stopped just short of buying "Hunger Games" sheets and pillowcases. Yet curiously, unless they're having a bit of sport and holding out on me, none has been able to explain the attraction to my satisfaction.
Truth be told, the first episode was a rousing good surprise ... a hip and energetic addition to the plethora of postapocalyptic treatises meant to scare the bejesus out of us while hopefully serving as a Jacob Marley to our Ebenezer Scrooge. That is, warn us of our civilization's wayward ways. I'm sure all the movie's fans immediately wrote their elected representatives and cautioned them about the creeping totalitarianism afoot in the land, just as I did when I read Orwell's "1984."
Continuing to apply a contemporary finish to classical, premonitory theories for a new generation, installment two, "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," was a still vibrant offering and rather decent insofar as followups go. But, with number three, which is really part one of two (huh?), I suggest my theory of business succession applies.
It goes like this: Mr. Henry Schmidlap invents a better mousetrap and builds a very profitable company. After it becomes Schmidlap & Son, young Ernie Schmidlap, who embraces the original values that inspired dear old dad, takes it to new heights. But by the time his kids, Bobo and Charlotte, inherit the business, they don't care about mousetraps; they're into the cheese.
Here, where the producers have decided to spread the third book into two installments, there is an implied arrogance that unfairly counts on the diehard devotees' fealty. With the action watered down save for some techno warfare here and there, the tale of revolution, counterrevolution and fascistic skullduggery takes a decidedly meandering path full of long-winded ponderings. It's all just rehashed poli sci 101, a refresher course for those who don't quite remember their Machiavelli.
So, instead of scintillating action, fresh out-of-the-box enthusiasm and cutting-edge derring-do slashing its way through this brave new dystopia, we get anguished young faces trying to make head or tail of the tragic dilemmas posed to them. Once the point is made, the quandary doesn't look good on Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen, essentially the Jeanne d'Arc of the series.
Point of disclosure: I don't care that much about the gal. I kind of feel terrible about it. Am I a bad person? I mean, I hope things work out for her … that she finds a nice guy if neither Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) nor Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) is the one, and that they settle down with a couple kids in a good neighborhood with a great school system. She deserves it. Heroine of the Hunger games, the opiating circus of despotic Panem run by canny President Snow (Donald Sutherland), she is being pulled from all angles.
In this chapter, rebel leader President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), at the urging of Plutarch Heavensbee, the consigliore extraordinaire exquisitely played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, petitions Katniss to be a symbol of the revolution ... to rally the masses against the Capitol. But she's skeptical, trying to reconcile the cause with her own feelings; namely, to ensure her family's safety and free Peeta from Snow's grip.
Call me an old fogy. While conceding that this bit of popular culture spews worthy metaphors and dabbles tolerably in the theories of absolutism, democracy and that wearying hypocrisy in-between, one nonetheless hopes it serves as a springboard for its more astute followers. When they get to college and study the French Revolution, they may remark, "Hey, this is a lot like 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1,'" but ultimately realize the film was but an appetizer.
"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1," rated PG-13, is a Lionsgate release directed by Francis Lawrence and stars Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Running time: 123 minutes
