The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Or: Feathers and Fangs

I will confess to not being much impressed with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes when Suzanne Collins unleashed it upon the world back in 2020. Collins’s return to Panem, sixty odd years before her celebrated Hunger Games trilogy, and the incubation of Coriolanus Snow, everyones favorite dystopian dictator with dramatic flair, never quite captured my attention. Granted, it was 2020 and I may have had other things on my mind at the time. Certainly a story about how a country or an individual can, with the best intentions, get sucked into the machinery of evil, is certainly worth another look.

While the book is always better, the new film adaptation by Francis Lawrence, is nothing to sneeze at. Rather than the puffed up patriarch of Donald Sutherland, the Snow of Yesteryear is presented by Tom Blyth, a hungry young man in every sense of the word. Balancing precariously on the ruins of his family’s wealth and name but still trying to swan his way through Capitol society, Snow finds himself picked to be a Mentor, along with two dozen of his classmates, in North America’s favorite bloodsport. He is paired with the Lucy Grey Baird (Rachel Zegler) a girl more fit to sing and break hearts than fight to death in an arena. Thus the games, and the games behind the games, begin.

Lawrence’s film unlike their predecessors (for all their values) has a visual richness that counterpoints and highlights its philosophical and literal horrors. The retro-futurism of the costumes and sets, have much to conjure with. Likewise the camera play is rarely wasted, making the most of skittering roaches and quiet lakes in equal measure. The visual touches also go hand in hand with the tight adaptation, keeping the story going while juggling most of Collins’s writerly gems (my favorite being Dr. Volumnia Gaul’s (Viola Davis) preferred snack of crackers and milk, so the viewer knows unequivocally, beyond the animal torcher and child endangerment, yes there is something seriously wrong with this woman.)

The cast of elders including the vibrantly wicked Dr. Gaul and Snow’s personal Snape, Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) nail every inch of their roles. Jason Schwartzman as the bumbling host of the Games Lucky Flickerman uses his dark humor to perfectly hit the tone of the movie (and I’d argue the franchise’s) mix of macaw interest and sickening dehumanization. Every time he appears to comment on a child’s death the theater tittered and then let the air out of the laughter as they remembered they were joking about murdered children. Fun times.

For Blyth and Zegler, as well as Josh Andrés Rivera as Snow’s too-big hearted school friend Sejanus Plinth, the actors are perfectly cast for their roles and fulfill the demands of their parts to the letter by not beyond. Zegler’s musical performances are stunning (the music right through the credits being superb and given its due, thank you Collins and James Newton Howard) but her social manipulation to survive lacks the shadings of complexity, and while Blyth’s start of darkness is well crafted it fails to be chilling. Rivera’s performance is deeply touching, warm hearted, and but is ultimately robbed, in to my mind a wasted opportunity, of the chance to deliver on his characters treasure. They are outdone by Hunter Schafer as Tigris, Snow’s cousin and closest confidant, whose papered over trauma shines a muted reflection on Blyth and brings him to greater life.

What I most love about the movie is despite it’s three hour run time, it does not feel any weight of the its minute. Each act is new and transforms from what came before. The story slithers just where it needs to be, accomplishes all the demands of its action, while leaving plenty of time to explore the world it’s created and the questions that what births tyranny on a personal and a national scale. Questions that well need considering, in this and in all times.