Coal Miner’s ‘Hunger Games’

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is based on Suzanne Collins’ 2020 prequel to the Hunger Games series, which takes you back to the teenage years of Coriolanus Snow, eventual murderous Panem president (Donald Sutherland) in the rest of the franchise. 

In this villain origin story, Tom Blyth (Billy the Kid) plays him as a scrappy survivor of a war that decimated his once-powerful family. He’s barely hanging on at his elite school, cobbling together outfits from household linens with the help of his sister Tigris (Hunter Shafer of Euphoria). The Hunger Games – a brutal punishment for the anti-Panem uprising – are in an early incarnation at this point, and their co-creator, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, in a Tyrion Lannister-adjacent performance) has decided to enlist students to “mentor” tributes chosen from the districts to fight to the death in an arena. 

THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Written by: Michael Leslie, Michael Arndt, Suzanne Collins
Starring: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Shafer, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis, Jason Schwartzman
Running time: 158 mins

The ambitious Coryo pairs with the female tribute from coal-mining District 12 (that’d be the same one from which our eventual heroine Katniss Everdeen hails). Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler of West Side Story) is a fiery folksinger who accepts her fate with a snippet of a song called “Nothing You Can Take From Me.” They drag her offstage after she snarls “kiss my ass” as a coda, and Coryo is visibly smitten. 

But we need to pause and talk about Zegler’s voice, which is just phenomenal. She’s said she channeled Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline and Joan Baez for the role, and that all comes through, but she also makes the performance entirely her own. (She might be better served to ditch the problematic Snow White movie and just start a band.) As someone who dutifully read all the books, I thought Suzanne Collins’ lyrics to district anthems like The Hanging Tree were beautiful, but the Appalachian-infused folk melodies the movies sets them to take them to an entirely new level. (I heard one teenage girl near me gasp when she heard the first notes of The Hanging Tree.) Zegler’s Lucy Gray isn’t a fighter like Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss, but she’s a folk hero nonetheless, and she brings a heartwrenching sincerity to the part that elevates this movie beyond what I’d have expected. 

They toss Lucy and the rest of the tributes into an old zoo exhibit for the citizens of Panem to gawk at in the days leading up to the games, while Viola Davis’ Dr. Volumnia Gaul, a mastermind behind the machinations of the games, cooks up terrifying new animal hybrids in her lab to add to the fun. Mockingjays are still in the development phase, but intelligent rainbow-colored venomous snakes are just about ready to go. Davis is clearly having a ball, decked out in costumes that nod toward what the citizens of Panem will be wearing decades hence. Josh Andrés Rivera is another standout as Sejanus Plinth, Coryo’s classmate with a conscience, who repeatedly endangers his own future to offer aid to the tributes and the district rebels. 

Francis Lawrence, who helmed all of the Hunger Games movies except the first (and, yes, best) one, directs Songbirds and Snakes. So there is a tonal similarity, but what makes this installment so striking is the lack of ostentatious dazzle that defined the games in their later years. Panem is still emerging from being decimated by an uprising; they toss the selected tributes, poor and sickly kids from the districts, into freight trains and then, unceremoniously, into a crumbling stadium to kill each other while glib weatherman Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman, perfectly cast), forefather to Stanley Tucci’s Caesar, tries to drum up a TV audience. The stripped-down proceedings add to the horror of a government murdering an oppressed people as punishment for a distant war they had nothing to do with. 

The book flagged a little in its last act, which sees Coryo and Lucy Gray negotiating a potential romance amidst the gloom of District 12 and catching some stolen pastoral moments in the countryside. The movie follows suit, with momentum slowing to the rather inconclusive showdown between the two. But Blyth, while not exactly a ringer for Sutherland, ably communicates Snow’s shifting moral compass, which ends up pointing him back to Panem and the Games. And the film’s run time, a daunting 2 hours 45 minutes, mostly flies by, I swear.

Even if you haven’t seen any of the movies or read any of the books, Songbirds and Snakes works well enough as a standalone. It’s the Y.A. Coal Miner’s Daughter–albeit with an appropriately dystopian ending. I didn’t expect to walk out of a Hunger Games movie with a roots music buzz, but I’m not complaining! Loretta would have approved.