What is so appealing about stories of fascists rising to power? Psychological curiosity perhaps, a need to uncover the origin of their methods, their evils -to find some semblance of understanding or humanity? These are after all, individualistic stories, not so concerned with how fascism takes root in a populace -it’s easier to make it a problem of a singular person. And maybe there’s just some morbid pleasure in that. Suzanne Collins wrote her book about a young fascist, a prequel to her successful dystopian Hunger Games series called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, in 2020. And it can be curious to think of her motivations, what she endeavoured to say through that choice of narrative. Is there a reason to see the ascendency of her big baddie, Coriolanus Snow?
Of course profit is an obvious motivator, the extension of a popular brand (Lionsgate developed the movie alongside Collins writing the book), and an origin story is an easy enough idea to milk. Still though, was there anything to glean out of this character? For more than two and a half hours, this movie, with its awkward unwieldy title so common now of young adult book adaptations, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, attempts to justify itself and affirm that there was.
And so we’re introduced to a teenage (and very Aryan-looking) Coriolanus (Tom Blyth), about a decade after the failed District uprising that resulted in the Hunger Games’ creation. He is a member of the prestige class in the Panem Capital, but his family has lost a great deal of their fortune during the war. As part of the elite university, he is selected to be a mentor to one of the district tributes, a girl from District 12 called Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler). But of course he has his own ambitions about the Games and Panem society more generally.
A lot of this movie is bent on world expansion, showcasing the earlier days of Collins’ universe. And indeed that is a big part of its appeal for fans of this media property. Much like its counterpart Harry Potter series and their own prequels, it is helmed by the same man who directed most of the prior films, Francis Lawrence, and thus retains the same visual language and set of aesthetics. It’s not a whole lot, but Lawrence is a much better director than David Yates -the film is colourful and feels tangible, adding to the sense of its world where the CGI backdrops might detract from it. To distinguish it from the time of the latter movies, he employs architectural and design styles evocative of the 50s and 60s, specifically in the look of the televisions and the old variety showman style of Jason Schwartzman’s flamboyant host. That Roman influence of the earlier movies is still maintained too, in things like the circular classroom with the teacher’s desk in the centre. It all makes for a movie that, at least while in the Capital, looks quite interesting.
Which does soften the fact the movie’s story isn’t told very interestingly, as Coriolanus gets to know Lucy Gray, starts to fall for her, and conspires to rig things so that she wins the Hunger Games. A chunk of it comes down to Coriolanus just not resonating as a very charismatic character, and his story not being given the depth necessary to make his arc satisfying. There’s an idea in there for a kind of fall from grace (I wonder if Collins wasn’t inspired by the Star Wars prequels), but nothing to foster much care towards this character beyond extremely surface-level concerns for his immediate family or Lucy Gray. From the start his darkness is apparent, his ambition and opportunism. Yet he’s also just very dull, with the constant glower and vacant expression of a generic white supremacist kid. Only in the last act does anything resembling real ethical conflict come to the fore, yet there remains no tension in how he will respond to it. I don’t think Blyth is so much to blame here as his script and the direction, clearly moulded to a pre-approved archetype.
Lucy Gray is hardly better served, though Zegler makes more with what she’s given and gets the chance to sing at several points, even if her fake southern drawl often borders on caricature. This character though, the woman who might tempt Coriolanus away from evil, is rather shallow in personality: a kind, spirited and defiant figure to contrast his and the Capitol’s rigid order. A slightly more curious version of these ideals comes in Josh Andres Rivera’s Sejanus, Coriolanus’s rebel-minded friend who straddles both Capitol privilege and provincial heritage. By far though the most compelling figures in the movie though are those played by Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis. The story of Dinklage’s Casca Highbottom, the drug-addicted credited creator of the Games, seems far more interesting than anything to do with Coriolanus, and Davis’ sadistic game-master Gaul is just a terribly fun devious villain.
Through her comes the classic Darwinian thesis about human nature that justifies the games and which it is obvious Coriolanus will come to take to heart. Lawrence does seem to pre-empt this with a particularly savage illustration of the games within a single gladiatorial arena with relatively few places to hide or wait out. It’s interesting to see a point where they are publicly declining in popularity, before Coriolanus’s innovations of essentially getting capitalism involved. He is seen to have been the source of this franchise’s most compelling facet -the celebrity and mass media culture analogue of the Games -which comes to him after Lucy Gray’s singing earns her a lot of popularity with the Capitol citizens. But without that critical element of the Hunger Games structure defined yet, it is a mere teen fight to the death, and while Lawrence finds some ways to keep it versatile within a fairly boring space, it’s never all that exciting.
The last act is pretty much its own sequel movie set entirely in District 12, where the question of Coriolanus’s redemption takes centre stage as he is with extreme bluntness presented several times with the option to be a good guy. Its focus on what is flagrantly a pretty shallow romance and the lack of any substantial tension over his moral quandary leaves this section of the story particularly underwhelming, with the only dash of something curious coming in a choice of deliberate ambiguity at its end -uncommon for a series like this.
Unfortunately, far too much of this movie is common, following the track of a lot of teen genre fiction in terms of its characters, aesthetics, and vague political themes. And there really is not enough to glean from this closer look at a young fascist for the film to wholly justify itself on those thematic terms: it doesn’t say anything substantive or meaningful about control or hate -most of the societal commentary was there to begin with. And again Coriolanus is just not very interesting -less so in fact than when Donald Sutherland played him and got something like a dozen lines per movie. Technically and in some of the performances, there is some power, and perhaps an accidental depth to be found in the film’s release timing -its set-up conspicuously allegorical to real world events and their dynamics. But these are just as much generic, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes as mediocre in inspiration as they come.
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