A big part of Jennifer Lawrence's appeal is how the actress, 21, crosses between that slippery threshold that borders a girl and a woman. Not in the coquettish way Audrey Hepburn sometimes did, but with an earthly, gutsy attitude of an autodidactic prize fighter _ without the dragon tattoo though. In a tracksuit, a bow and arrows slung back, as she often appears in The Hunger Games, Lawrence is an underaged hunter now on the run from a pack of bloodhound predators, and we feel the nervousness of a girl thrust into the centre of an adult game. And yet, there are moments when she glows with ripe womanhood. Not just in her figure, but her conviction and grit. Sorry to the droves of Twilight fans, but Lawrence's character, Katniss Everdeen, makes the vampire-lusting Bella look like a case of arrested development.
The Hunger Games
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Donald Sutherland, Liam Hemsworth. Directed by Gary Ross.
So we watch Katniss run and flee, then outsmart and even kill her competitors in the Hunger Games, a vicious, televised reality show conceived with dictatorial subtext. Based on the first book of the best-selling series by Suzanne Collins _ the second film is now in the pipeline _ The Hunger Games imagines a futuristic empire of decadent bourgeoisie who populate a baroquial, monumental edifice and feast on the spectacle of children killing one another, while TV pundits pour out observations about their moves, strategies and plot twists. When world politics fail, this is what the World Cup might devolve into.
The tyrannical agenda of the game, chaired by President Snow (Donald Sutherland), is to subdue rebellious seeds and show who the real master of the people's fate is: Each year the 12 Districts of the nation of Panem are demanded to ship a pair of "tributes", a boy and a girl, to participate in the Hunger Games, in which 24 contenders are let loose in the jungle to hunt each other down. The sole survivor is the winner. The two governing forces of the show are political imperialism and addiction to violence as a form of entertainment. We're repulsed by the former and complicit in the latter. The 24 contenders _ some so young they won't last a minute after the butchering starts _ are sacrificial lambs to the altar of authoritarianism, which walks hand in hand with its modern buddy, TV consumerism.
Katniss volunteers to represent her district, a coal-mining outpost whose bleak aesthetics resembles a concentration camp. The boy who's picked to go with her is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) a baker's son who secretly has a crush on Katniss _ never mind that while she has the aura of a tigress he's like a frightened deer. They journey to the Capitol, the cold, slick centre of the empire, and are prepped for this fatal version of Survivor by a team of eccentrics; this is a chance for us to enjoy Woody Harrelson as a colourful drunk, Elizabeth Banks as a pink-haired harridan, and Lenny Kravitz as an androgynous impresario with golden eyeshadow. It doesn't take much to fathom: The Hunger Games is a satire of our glut of TV reality shows that make the case of saluting but actually exploit young talents, parading them like live products in a televised zoo, all for the sake of our living-room amusement.
Pop-culture skivvies can blame me for not having read the book. That doesn't hamper the general satisfaction of the film version, directed by Gary Ross to possess a solemn climate of a post-apocalyptic world. Lawrence takes us along on the ride by giving Katniss a mix of apprehension and sweetness, of adolescent vulnerability and necessary courage, and the film tries hard to maintain the first-person perspective of the book, for this is a story of young adults thrown and trapped in the grotesquerie of grown-up's making.
That said, the violence _ both the subject and the criticism of the story _ is pretty much contained (it's rated PG13 in the US), at least when compared to the similar set-up in the controversial Japanese kid-slaughtering-kid film Battle Royale, or the philosophical ancestor of them all, Lord of the Flies. This being an American movie aiming for the mass global market, The Hunger Games shows just enough blood to make its point, yet perhaps not enough to elevate the whole thing into a genuine pondering of our state of mind concerning the consumption of movie violence. Not that I'm pleading for sadism: this is just to point out the temperament of Hollywood filmmaking as opposed to the independent-minded approach, for while Kinji Fukasaku's 2000 opus Battle Royale is confrontational and a terrifying descent into anarchy, The Hunger Games, for all its moral questioning, feels like a simulation that arrives with a degree of detachment, even aloofness, to save us, the spectators, from the pain and guilt of being complicit to the whole ugly shebang.
The bottom line is, go watch Jennifer Lawrence, who played the life-hardened girl in Winter's Bone and now makes this 150-minute adventure a cool-headed, engaging trip into the dystopia of future America. Meanwhile, maybe I'll dig up Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale, or Michael Haneke's Funny Games for the awkward pleasure of on-screen brutalisation that lots of us eat as dinner now.
