The Ratings Game

In the Hunger Games, children kill other children because a tyrannous government orders them to do so in a grotesque TV spectacle. In Bully, children torment other children because, as one official tells parents at a town hearing, “kids will be kids.” The first movie is dystopian fiction and is based on the initial volume in Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy of young-adult novels. The second is painful reality: Lee Hirsch’s documentary details the abuse that too many young people suffer at the hands of their peers. The Hunger Games is likely to follow the movies of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises as a giant commercial hit whose audience will dwarf Bully’s. But both films raise a vexing question for parents and for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the industry’s arbiter of movie ratings: What should kids see?

The MPAA typically considers three criteria–explicit violence, intense sexuality and raw language–in rating a film R for restricted, meaning a child under 17 can attend only with an adult guardian. Neither The Hunger Games nor Bully qualifies on the sex grounds. Collins’ teen contestants may be expert with instruments of destruction, but they are erotically ignorant. In Bully, the young predators do most of their damage with trash talk.

The debatable issue in The Hunger Games is the amount of violence, including deaths by arrow, harpoon and machete. Because the movie doesn’t linger on these moments–there’s no kick to the kills–the MPAA classified The Hunger Games PG-13, allowing kids of any age to see it unsupervised. That’s the same rating given to the quartet of Twilight films and to four of the eight Harry Potter movies, which were aimed at a slightly younger audience; the other four Potters got an even milder PG. For Lionsgate, The Hunger Games’ sponsor, to release an R version would be a form of corporate hara-kiri.

In Bully, the kids who hand out verbal punishment occasionally use profanity as a tool of intimidation. “I will f—in’ end you and stuff a broomstick up your ass,” one boy, sitting in a Sioux City, Iowa, school bus, snarls at his 12-year-old seatmate. For six instances of the F word, the MPAA slapped Bully with the proscriptive R rating. Most of the MPAA board members voted to overturn that original rating, but the motion failed because it fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds threshold. Thus Bully will be denied to many of the children it means to help–predators and prey alike.

A March 15 Washington screening hosted by MPAA boss and former Senator Chris Dodd was jammed with supporters of the film. Katy Butler, a Michigan teen whose petition on behalf of a PG-13 rating for the film has attracted more than 400,000 signatures, was there. So was David Long; the death of his 17-year-old son Tyler, who hanged himself after a torrent of taunting, is one of five cases of abused kids Bully tracks over the course of the 2009–10 school year. “A picture’s worth a thousand words,” Long said to Dodd of the need to change the film’s rating so more children can see it. The hubbub was heaven to Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. is distributing the film. Any indie doc can use free publicity. Bully did better: it became a cause for concerned parents and kids.

A 1-in-24 Chance of Surviving

Beyond the matter of whether the films would do harm to children (we say no) is whether they’re good movies. Our own ruling is a yes for Bully and, for The Hunger Games, a more qualified “Eh.”

For the six of you without any children or access to worldwide media, The Hunger Games is set in Panem, a future America run by clever tyrants who annually stage a kind of Survivor Thunderdome Olympics. Twenty-four children ages 12 to 18, two from each of Panem’s 12 districts, are chosen at random and obliged to kill off their competitors until only one, the Victor, remains and is rewarded with a life of plenty. In dirt-poor District 12, the sturdy 16-year-old archer Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to sub for her younger sister. The boy from District 12 is the callow, resourceful Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who carries a secret torch for Katniss.

The movie version, for which Collins helped write the screenplay, contains most of the novel’s set pieces, including the contestants’ televised chats with smarmy Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) and the grueling ordeal in the woods, in which Katniss and Peeta must each decide whether to kill the other and win or join forces and risk dying together.

Director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) also visualizes Panem’s chasm between the haves and the have-nothings. If District 12 is a Dorothea Lange photomontage of Appalachian poverty, the Capitol is a Tea Party member’s horrified vision of gaudy Manhattan nightlife. The one-percenters’ outr couture and coiffure define their decadence; the manicured beard of head gamemaker Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) is as artificially curved as the flames painted on a clown car. Think Fellini but with less brio.

That’s the movie’s problem: it lacks juice. Ross doesn’t dare have too much fun with the ruling vultures–their excesses might seem too appealing–and he dulls the violence to adhere to the PG-13 guidelines. Collins didn’t have to worry about them when she wrote the novel; her vivid, relentless prose put the reader in Katniss’s mind and guts. But that was a book, not a commodity aiming for a billion-dollar worldwide gross. What Ross has created feels dutiful–as if his name had been drawn at random and the job were not the chance of a lifetime but a slog to the death.

Alex Libby, the 12-year-old who is threatened on the Sioux City bus in Bully, might watch The Hunger Games and think the contestants’ lot is better than his: at least they have a 1-in-24 chance of surviving. A sweet, smart kid who’s short on friends, Alex underplays an incident when he tells a school official that “this high schooler was stranglin’ me, but I think he was just messin’ around.”

The sad truth is that the kids in Bully already live in a world rated R–for the physical or psychic violence they suffer and the vicious language tossed at them. Some footage in Bully indicates that schools do little–and care less. “Boys will be boys,” says Dean Donehoo, director of administration for the Murray County, Georgia, schools at a town hearing on Tyler Long’s death. “They’re just cruel at that age.”

As full of dread as any horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama, Bully ends hopefully, as parents of abused children convene to commemorate lost souls and agitate for school reform. The documentary could provide a clear mirror of distorted values to young victimizers and their victims. But first these kids must be allowed to see it.