The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1’ Review: A Substantial Serving of Drama From Team Lawrence, If you need any more reasons to admire Jennifer Lawrence—I don’t—here’s a tidbit from an unlikely source. It’s her reply to an interview question on a website for her latest movie, “
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1.” The question is a ritual softball about her role as the young heroine Katniss Everdeen: “What aspects of your own personality do you bring to your character?” She says, refreshingly: “I don’t really feel like there is a lot of myself in Katniss.” In other words, she’s a professional actress, and what she does in the role is called acting. It is, in fact, acting of a high order in a film that puts a premium on fine performances. “Mockingjay” is a rare bird in its genre, an action adventure with an interesting mind and a resonant spirit.
And what of the action component? It’s sufficient and occasionally exciting, as in one moment of desperation when Katniss tries to bring down a swooping fighter plane with her bow and arrow. Still, the action is clearly subordinate to preparations for what will be, in the fourth and final film of the series, a climactic battle between contending forces—those of President Snow, the dictator played with fragrant as well as flagrant evil by Donald Sutherland, and the rebels led by Katniss in her role of Mockingjay, the defiant symbol of the revolution.
There’s been considerable controversy about the decision to split “Mockingjay,” the third book of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, into two separate productions. But this latest film, which Francis Lawrence directed from a screenplay by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, proves to be much more than scene-setting. It’s about the power of political symbols, and the danger of becoming one—about Katniss staying true to herself, and to those she loves, while her handlers seek to reshape her into some sort of sci-fi Joan of Arc.
Mockingjay” starts slowly, yet pace is not a problem. Rather, it’s a sign of the movie’s well-founded confidence that its star can sustain interest in a question whose answer is obvious: Has the heroine, who destroyed the Games single-handedly, been destroyed by them? Any doubts in that department disappear when Katniss rekindles an inner fire that makes her a perfect candidate for the Mockingjay mantle.
Then the packaging games begin. “We will make you the best-dressed rebel in history,” crows the unquenchable escort Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks.) “Everyone’s going to want to kiss you, kill you or be you,” says Katniss’s stalwart ally Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) after she has played a grotesque version of herself in a propaganda video. Maybe so, but the emergent symbol isn’t buying it so easily—not from either of them, or from Julianne Moore’s steely-eyed, tough-minded rebel president, Alma Coin, and definitely not from the gamemaker-turned-video-auteur Plutarch Heavensbee, played blithely—and, given the circumstances, heartbreakingly—in a pieced-together appearance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died while “Mockingjay” was in production.
As smart as this film is about image-making in the age of all-pervasive media, the theme threatens to wear thin until Katniss comes to a new and moving awareness of her power, not just as a figurehead fashioned and elaborately feathered by political consultants but as a source of authentic inspiration to her shattered nation. (In a lovely and lyrical interlude, she sings a haunting song, “The Hanging Tree,” that reminded me of the purity and simplicity of Ms. Lawrence’s first starring role as Ree Dolly, the indomitable young heroine of “Winter’s Bone.”) Woody Harrelson brings his own simplicity to the ever more canny Haymitch Abernathy. Liam Hemsworth is ever more appealing as Katniss’s companion in arms Gale Hawthorne, while Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta Mellark remains a strong presence in the plot, even though Peeta is, during much of the action, President Snow’s prisoner, and prize hostage.
