The basic premise of “The Hunger Games,” the first volume in Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of young-adult novels, never made much sense to me. How could a totalitarian government keep its people down while forcing some of their children to fight to the death in a yearly competition? What could be a greater goad to revolution than the anguish of seeing children die? There were other mysteries and not a few hypocrisies: the filmmakers who adapted the book shrugged off the gladiatorial issues implicit in the spectacle. They wanted to create indignation over the horror—children forced to hunt one another with arrows, swords, lances—while staging the violence in the most anodyne manner possible to achieve a PG-13 rating. The teens I know accepted the combat as a given, while their elders, bewildered, and looking for a little meaning, interpreted the story as a representation of how kids felt about the competitive traumas of high school; or as a metaphor for capitalism, with its terrifying job market and winner-take-all ethos; or, more simply, as a satiric exaggeration of talent-show ruthlessness. The premise of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” an adaptation of Collins’s second volume, doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. Having survived the competition through daring and ingenuity, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and her admirer, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), receive riches and acclaim from the vicious overlords in the Capitol. Yet rebellion is breaking out in the twelve districts of the country, called Panem, and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his new head gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), cook up a fresh scheme: they will choose among the survivors of all the competitions, some of them now middle-aged or elderly, and throw them into a new struggle, which will somehow quell the rebellion. Distraction is supposed to work miracles. Along with this gang of heavies, Katniss and Peeta are pushed back into the woods to fight again.
Gary Ross’s direction of the first movie, with its wandering, jiggling camera and its fragmented, messy staging, was pretty much an embarrassment. Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend”), working with a screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael deBruyn, has taken over, and parts of “Catching Fire”—at least the first forty-five minutes or so—are impressive. The scenes in Katniss’s home turf, District 12, have the feel of life under totalitarian control. The mood is Eastern-bloc depression, a gray world drained of vitality. The images are large-scale and weighted: menacing military vehicles charge through the demoralized cities; faceless storm troopers in white plastic helmets clobber people with truncheons. For Katniss, the pleasure of victory never arrives. At the very beginning of the movie, we see her in silhouette, crouching at the edge of a pond, a huntress poised to uncoil. She hates being a celebrity, and she certainly has no desire to lead a revolution. Jennifer Lawrence’s gray-green eyes and her formidable concentration dominate the camera. She resembles a story-book Indian princess, and she projects the kind of strength that Katharine Hepburn had when she was young. Two guys vie for Katniss’s love—not just the doleful, fair-haired Peeta but the faithful, darkly handsome Gale (Liam Hemsworth). But happiness is not her fate. She’s tormented, and wary.
The film moves back to the Capitol for more of the extravagant decadence and purple-pink luxury that was so puzzling in the first movie. Why is everyone dressed in wigs, glitter, and eye shadow, as if outfitted for a drag ball that never ends? The crowds are nothing more than seething, bright-colored décor. Stanley Tucci returns as Caesar Flickerman, and again brilliantly parodies beauty-pageant and talent-show hosts. Unctuous and hostile at the same time, Tucci flashes enormous choppers that glisten in the light. Donald Sutherland, with his satanic eyebrows and rounded, insinuating voice, is an entertainingly threatening presence. And Woody Harrelson, as the hard-drinking realist Haymitch, who guides Katniss through every terror, is the core of intelligence in the movie; he is used more centrally here than in the first film, and his glare and his acid voice cut through the meaningless fashion show. Yet, despite the good acting, the middle section of the film, set at the Capitol, is attenuated and rhythmless—the filmmakers seem to be touching all the bases so that the trilogy’s readers won’t miss anything. In the woods, Francis Lawrence recovers his skills, at least for a while: some of the starts and frights—a bunch of snarling devil baboons, some enveloping poisonous smoke—work in a B-movie-ish way. But there are complications in the plot that the filmmakers can’t sort out. Characters we barely know go chasing through the brush, brandishing weapons. Who are Katniss and Peeta’s friends? Who are their enemies? Some of the confusion is intentional, some of it the result of ineptitude, and the grand climax, whose elements include a long piece of wire, a lightning bolt, and an electronic force field, is an incoherent, rapid blur that will send the audience scurrying back to the book to find out what’s supposed to be going on. Cinema can provide explosions of light and terrors bursting through the foliage, but when it comes to basic exposition of complicated physical events, literature—even a calculating young-adult novel—may have the movies beat.
In some ways, Lance Armstrong is a familiar American type. A handsome man, he has strong, regular features, a ready smile, a finely honed, slender body; he also has an unblinking military gaze that would melt a steel girder. As he admits, in Alex Gibney’s documentary “The Armstrong Lie,” his life has been damaged by the need to win every encounter, be it personal or professional. Armstrong lied until it was impossible for him to lie anymore, and Gibney’s movie unexpectedly hinges on that moment. Seven-time winner of the Tour de France, world-famous exemplar of physical courage (he survived testicular cancer in his twenties), Armstrong, having beaten back countless accusations that he was doping, retired in 2005. But in 2009 he attempted a comeback. The point was to prove that he was “clean,” and to validate his earlier titles by winning another. Gibney, usually a skeptical liberal filmmaker (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side”), was determined to make a positive movie about an American hero. During the 2009 Tour de France, he joined Armstrong’s entourage with a camera crew. Armstrong, as it turned out, didn’t win; he finished third. And in 2010 fresh accusations were made against him. Cornered, he finally confessed to Oprah Winfrey, last January, that he had been doping since the nineteen-nineties. Gibney then reshuffled his footage and put himself, as a self-confessed patsy, in the movie. “The Armstrong Lie” goes on forever, perhaps because Gibney can’t believe that, like everyone else, he’s been had. Again and again, he looks for elements of moral clarity (never mind remorse) in Armstrong, and the cyclist looks back at Gibney (and at us) as if he were a fool. His attitude is: Don’t you get it?
What we don’t get is how often winners will do whatever it takes to win. Gibney interviews Armstrong’s former teammates, who say that, in the nineties, many cyclists were doping, and that they had no choice but to do the same if they were to maintain a competitive edge. An event like the Tour de France is mostly “suffering”—a three-week slog through the Alps and other difficult terrain. Doping increases the amount of oxygen in the blood, delaying the moment when the muscles become exhausted and quit. Armstrong, like many others, took testosterone and the drug EPO. He also refreshed his own blood now and then, transporting the elixir to various tournaments and transfusing it back into his depleted system. (Gibney speculates that he withdrew blood after cycling in the Rockies.) One of the greatest athletes in the world became a kind of ghoul, feeding on his own body.
For Armstrong, success creates its own benediction, absolution, and redemption; after all, as he reminds Gibney, his victories and his personal story brought extraordinary levels of attention and money to the cycling world—competitors, cycling associations, bike manufacturers, media coverage. Many people benefitted from his victories. From our point of view, however, it’s hard to overstate his cynicism. The bitterest parts of Gibney’s movie are the interviews with the former teammates who were caught doping, and whom Armstrong, when he was still officially clean, viciously turned on. These men took the fall. In competition, they literally covered for him—providing protection from wind resistance by riding around him until he could burst from the pack at the last minute to win. For most of his professional life, Armstrong lived in a safety zone created by others. Gibney doesn’t get much out of him; his admissions are as brief, bald, and dismissive as his lies. What’s most alive in him is his contempt for “dickheads”—anyone who has ever held him responsible for anything. The most determined person in the movie, apart from Armstrong, is Betsy Andreu, whose husband, the cyclist Frankie Andreu, was an Armstrong teammate and a victim. She told the truth about Armstrong under subpoena, and refused to be rattled when she was attacked by him and his supporters. In front of Gibney’s camera, she’s both defiant and regretful. Armstrong’s fierce desire to predominate created fear and loyalty. In Betsy Andreu, he seems to have met his match. ♦
