Eugene weekly., March 29, 2012, Page 21, Image 21

movies
BY MOLLY TEMPLETON
thumb of Donald Sutherland’s President
Snow); gaudy Capitol commentators who
provide context and explanation; and
shots of the Games’ audience, staring up at
huge screens. It’s an excellent opportunity
to heighten the sense that the Games are
reality television, with a carefully structured
narrative and Tributes cast as heroes and
villains. To a degree, this works, but without
the immediacy of Katniss’ narration, there’s
less tension between her growing fury at
the Capitol’s game and her knowledge that
survival means playing it as best she can.
The horror of The Hunger Games resides
not just in the Games themselves but in the
way they mirror Katniss’ daily struggle to
survive in her poor mining district — it’s the
same struggle, bloodied up and broadcast as
kicks for the rich. But rarely does the fi lm
convincingly supply this sense of horror. At
times, the screenplay is too faithful to the
book, and things that worked when seen
from Katniss’ perspective now seem too
pat, the outcome inevitable.
The problem isn’t that Ross’ adaptation
is a fairly bloodless PG-13; he knows how
to stage a shocking death. It’s something that
runs deeper and is harder to pin down. This
Hunger Games feels safe: Its heroine’s sharp
edges are fi led down, and its indictment of
a willfully oblivious society hides under
the Capitol’s garish costumes and affected
laughter. The Hunger Games isn’t willing
to trust our investment in Katniss’ story and
risk making us uncomfortable about what
we watch unquestioningly, or what horrors
we ignore in order to live as we please. It’s
here to entertain, and it does just that. ew
The Slightly Peckish Games
Panem comes solidly to life
THE HUNGER GAMES: Directed by
Gary Ross. Screenplay by Gary Ross, Billy Ray
and Suzanne Collins, based on Collins’ novel.
Cinematography, Tom Stern. Editors, Christopher
S. Capp, Stephen Mirrione, Juliette Welfl ing. Music,
James Newton Howard. Starring Jennifer Lawrence,
Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody
Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz and Elizabeth Banks.
Lionsgate, 2012. PG-13. 142 minutes.44421
T
he Hunger Games is a solid piece
of entertainment about kids being
forced to kill other kids for the
amusement of a corrupt elite. I put it so
bluntly because the movie, based on the
novel by Suzanne Collins, would prefer that
you think it’s about a smart, tough girl who
beats the system at its own hideous game.
It does a careful dance of having its cake
and eating it too, presenting a horrible idea
and then shying away from placing blame
for the horrors at the feet of a complacent
and disconnected society.
That’s not us, right? We’re Katniss
(Jennifer Lawrence), the capable, quietly
rebellious 16-year-old who volunteers to
take her little sister’s place in the Hunger
Games. The Games are the tool of the
Capitol, the seat of power in the nation
of Panem, which rose from the ashes of
a shattered North America. Every year,
two kids from each of the nation’s twelve
districts are chosen as “Tributes.” They’re
sent to the Capitol, prettied up, given a bit
of training and dropped into an arena, where
they fi ght to the death under the watchful
eyes of countless cameras, like Survivor
with a body count.
Other than a too-generous dose of
handheld camera action, which succeeds
only in drawing attention to itself, the movie
looks fantastic, from Katniss’ trademark
braid to the luxurious Capitol apartments
to the golden eyeliner on Cinna (Lenny
Kravitz), Katniss’ sympathetic stylist.
Kravitz, like the rest of the supporting
cast, is excellent, but the fi lm rests on
Jennifer Lawrence’s shoulders. She carries
it confi dently, and while I wished the fi lm
could get a little more into Katniss’ head,
Lawrence has the physical presence required
to make Katniss a convincing survivor.
Collins’ novel is told in Katniss’ voice;
we see only what she sees. Gary Ross’ fi lm
expands this, giving us the Gamemakers in
their space-age control room (and under the
In Darkness
The Oscar-nominated Polish fi lm In Darkness
truly resides in darkness. There is the dank, fl ickering
dimness of the sewer system where a small group of
Polish Jews hides after their ghetto is murderously
hollowed out by Nazis; there’s the looming shadow
cast by the city worker upon whom this starving,
hunted group is forced to place its tenuous trust; and
overwhelming everything is the black hole of the
Holocaust, extinguishing every glimmer of human hope.
Directed by Agnieszka Holland and based on
the actual heroics of Poldek Socha, a Polish sewer
worker in the former city of Lwow, In Darkness is
a gritty, claustrophobic suspense story that rarely
trades complexity and ambiguity for the easy stuff of
Spielbergian uplift. The movie is nearly bloodless, but
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its violence is profound and crushing.
Too often, it is our very sense of drear moral
obligation that causes us to shy away from fi lms like
this, and yes, In Darkness is a jarring journey into the
inconceivable terror of Nazism and all it says about our
humanity. So was Casablanca.
The strength of In Darkness is its unfl inching eye
for detail (a body falling past a window in the distance)
and its capacity to engage our senses in the immediacy
of the action. For the most part, its characters are fully
fl eshed, and treachery and weakness — especially of
the carnal kind — are not the exclusive domain of evil
cardboard Nazis. This is a gripping, soulful fi lm that
earns its cathartic moments the hard way, with honesty
and guts. — Rick Levin
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EUGENE WEEKLY MARCH 29, 2012 21