An unlikely star shines darkly in ‘Hunger Games’

Sing to me O’ muse, the anger of Everdeen’s daughter Katniss and its devastation, which wrought pains upon one score and two Tributes, hurled the strong souls of heroes, in their multitude, to death in the arena, and gave their bodies to be a feast for dogs, pincushions for mutated wasps, and the will of The Capitol was accomplished since that time when first there stood in bitter conflict, the children of the Districts and the sly and brilliant Gamemaker, Seneca Crane. . .

You’ll pardon me the epic tenor of this intro if you’ve seen the movie or read the books comprising Suzanne Collins’ rampantly successful “Hunger Games” series.

The story is epic—and not in the over-worn parlance of American teenagers—but like to the works of Homer, Virgil, and J.K. Rowling.

In eager anticipation of the film, I fell into the books with reckless abandon at the beginning of the semester. They have their ups and downs, literary triumphs and disappointments, but what they lack are the visuals of the “Hunger Games” movie.

Sure, the boundaries of the imagination are far greater than even the finest computer-generated imagery. But my feeble reader’s brain could never have cooked up the dark fire and majesty of the movie’s unlikely hero.

The book pays short shrift to what the movie designers undoubtedly knew would be the dark horse scene-stealer. (And for the semi-literate mobs on the Internet, I’m not talking about Rue or Thresh. They’re dark-skinned in the book too, try reading more attentively before you go a-blathering on the Web in your casually racist way.)

No, I’m talking about the true surprise darling of the film’s excellent cast: Seneca Crane’s beard. For such is the stuff of legends and could only exist so perfectly in a completely fictional world on the face of a completely fictional man.

To whit, although Wes Bentley brought a great presence to the role of Seneca Crane, his performance was muted almost entirely by the mossy sable curlicues of his Capitol-fashionable beard.

Reading the book, I was gladdened by Crane’s eventual downfall, but the filmic experience evoked the exact opposite feeling.

Not only because of the acuteness of his hirsuteness, but because the director and screenplay show us a different version of Crane—a subtly emotional man, who allowed the viewers of The Hunger Games a measure of hope in Peeta and Katniss’ (sham) relationship.

Katniss and Peeta’s subtle glances leave us desiring so much more at the close, but Crane’s end—and thus that of his beard—is as tragic as Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector in the Iliad.

The comparison is almost too apt and the pain too real—after all, the Greeks never told a tragedy without a multitude of beards.