I wasn't really worried about whether director Francis Lawrence, who shepherded three of the four previous Hunger Games movies, would deliver a very well made and watchable flick with The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. But I was worried that there wouldn't be much point to this thing, since villain-focused prequels aren't usually that worthwhile. What I found instead was the best and most interesting film in this series.
There's a moment in the middle that summed the whole thing up for me. Coriolanus Snow, who will grow up to become the evil President Snow from the previous movies, is tasked with helping popularize District 12's tribute in the 10th annual Hunger Games in order to win a large amount of money from the father of one of his wealthy classmates. The noble Snow family has fallen on hard times in the years since the death of its patriarch, Coriolanus's father, and this prize could return them to some measure of prominence.
His tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, is wary of him despite him being by far the most helpful mentor--she knows he's probably not doing it because he cares about her. So she demands to know what really matters to him: helping her live through this hell, or winning the money?
"Both," Snow says, baldly. Both Lucy Gray and I appreciated the honesty, but we also both knew this statement meant that he was looking out for himself and his family first, and then her if it ends up being convenient.
What I'm saying here is that Coriolanus Snow is a great, enthralling character, played with a creepy intensity by Tom Byth. From the start, he has the same sneering condescension toward the tributes ("District trash") as most of his classmates do. It's setting up a classic romantic drama premise, with a nobleman who can perhaps find out who he truly is by falling in love with a wise, down-to-earth, low-class woman.
Fortunately, that's not what The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is. Instead, this gritty prequel never has any desire to be what you'd expect from a story like this one--it's not a story where dreams come true, but rather one where reality comes crashing down on our protagonists.
It's effective in part because it hews so closely to the book, cramming in so many different contextual details about Snow, his family, and his up-and-down relationship with Lucy Gray--but that also makes it pretty dense and subtle compared with your average big-budget franchise movie. If you don't already know the story, you're liable to miss one detail or another the first time you watch it.
I don't think that's a flaw, because it won't impact your ability to follow the plot. It just makes your second and third viewings all the richer. Which is great, because there's also plenty of novelty here that will also make repeat viewings worthwhile. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set during the 10th Hunger Games (Katniss's first was the 74th), and it's a very different show. Before all the pomp and celebrity treatment that we saw in the original films, the tributes were treated very poorly--transported in rusty train cars and then housed in a zoo exhibit.
But ratings are down for the Games, and so the very creepy Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) wants to try some new things to boost viewership by having her students, Snow's class, brainstorm ideas--Snow himself comes up with the idea for sponsors buying supplies for the participants--and mentor the tributes. And also by having a host for the first time, Jason Schwartzman's Lucky Flickerman.
This early, primitive version of the Hunger Games is fascinating and a lot of fun to see, and Schwartzman's whole "we don't really know what we're doing here so we're trying everything to see what sticks" bit is outrageously funny, punctuating each death in the Games with some inappropriate and insensitive quip. Where Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman in the previous movies was a seasoned TV host, Schwartzman is more like a YouTube personality. It's perfect.
But while other characters threaten to steal the show here and there, the movie never loses sight of Snow as its focus--not as its hero. There are two characters, Lucy Gray and his classmate Sejanus, who serve as angels on Snow's shoulders, tempting him with moral goodness--he doesn't have a devil voice whispering in his ear because he fills that role himself. Rachel Zegler, as Lucy Gray, gives an excellent performance about 95% of the time--those other parts are when she has to utter some kind of Southern-sounding colloquialism, which she can't pull off. But for most of the film she's got exactly the right energy, that of a singer and musician who just doesn't give a s**t about propriety, and she's more than got the pipes for the musical performances she delivers.
Sejanus (Josh Andres Rivera), meanwhile, is a bleeding-heart rich kid from District 2 whose family bought their way into the capital. Sejanus really wants to do something, anything, to help those who are being oppressed by the dictatorship of Panem. And he regularly tries to rope in Snow, who simply will not entertain these ideas--he's too intent on being a part of the system, rather than reforming it. Sejanus might have been the hero in a different version of this story.
With these two characters around, Snow has every opportunity to not become the heinous dictator that we know he will. But the secret weapon of this story is in its fatalism--had things gone slightly differently, Snow could have found some kind of redemption. But they didn't go differently, and Snow became a force for evil. He didn't sit there and carefully consider and weigh every option that was in front of him, and then choose to become a bad guy. His momentum carried him to it.
That sense of Snow simply riding the flow is enhanced by the fever-dream quality of Francis Lawrence's filmmaking, including plenty of disorienting wide-angle shots from cinematographer Jo Willems. There's always something lost when adapting a book--a movie can't quite get inside the characters' heads the way a novel can. But that filmmaking approach, giving every aspect of the movie at least a somewhat different vibe from his own past films in the series, and often a much different vibe, keeps things interesting despite a running time that approaches three hours. Even with that length, though, the epilogue might be a bit too clean and neat--we go from the climax of the film to Snow the Big Bad in only a couple minutes, but a Return of the King-esque closing sequence might have helped.
Ultimately, though, what mattered to me most with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is that it could justify its own existence. And it more than does that, with a story that humanizes Snow in the best possible way--by showing that he was probably doomed from the start.
