A Spoiler Review.
This film exists in a tradition of the villain’s journey. The protagonist is the antagonist of a famous tale, and we see sympathetic beginnings, temptations and flaws, and ultimately his or her tragic ascendancy to become the villain we come to hate. What’s compelling about these stories is the dramatic irony. We know who he or she will become in the end, but we can’t help hoping that it might not happen. Notable examples include the Star Wars prequels, Wicked, and some of the recent Disney live-action films.1
The trick with these types of stories is to strike a delicate balance between likability and believability. You don’t want to tell a story with a protagonist that’s despicable from the start. You have to give the audience a reason to root for the protagonist. Trying too hard to do this, however, can feel fake and contrived. The audience might have a hard time believing that this person whom they like so much could really become the villain in such a short time.
A key way to achieve this balance is to give the character a clear desire that’s understandable, relatable, and maybe even commendable. Over the course of the story, the protagonist takes regrettable actions in pursuit of that goal. He or she might make mistakes. In the end we realize that the cracks were there all along. Great films of this kind make the transformation seem tragically inevitable.
So the question is: did Songbirds and Snakes properly strike this balance? I’m not sure I think so.
In Part 1, Coriolanus Snow’s motive is clear. He falls for Lucy Gray, and he’s willing to jeopardize his shot at the prize money to help her survive the games. It seemed that there was a chance for him to achieve both goals, but as Part 2 comes to a close, the risks that he took to save Lucy Gray ultimately doom him to a 20 year Peacekeeping sentence in the districts. In this first section, Snow’s flaws do begin to emerge. He’s a killer, willing to take lives to save himself. That’s basically all we see, though.
It’s in the third part that the real problems begin to arise. Throughout this section, I wasn’t sure what his goal was. His actions were erratic and unpredictable. I’m not sure this was the right call. Does he want to return to the Capital or run off with Lucy Gray? Does he care about Sejanus, his “best friend”? Was he really being opportunistic the whole time, and didn’t really care about making a difference? He makes the recording of Sejanus’s treasonous words and sends it to the Capital, but the movie lets us forget about that until his hanging. I wonder if Snow forgot about it too. Did he really want Sejanus to be punished? Killed? At the end of the movie he reaps a number of benefits from having Sejanus killed. There’s no way that was really his plan. He cried over his death in the barracks. Was that an act?
Something else worth mentioning. The inevitability of the downfall is a great plot device that elevates these kind of stories. It helps to have a moment to look forward to. Something we know will mark the protagonist as having ‘turned to the dark side,’ so to speak. In the Star Wars prequels, Anakin dons the Darth Vader suit. The helmet covers his face for the last time, and we know the transformation is complete. We’d been fearing it the whole time. Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t really have this moment. This may simply betray my lack of familiarity with the source material, but there wasn’t really a moment where I knew he had transformed into evil Snow.
Instead of gradually and inevitably becoming a villain over the course of the 157 min runtime, Snow’s mostly a good, likable person until 2 hours into the movie, after which he makes a baffling series of decisions that result in Lucy abandoning him. He hops on the train and returns to the Capital. Suddenly he’s an ice-cold killer and fully transformed into the Snow we knew from the original series.
Footnotes
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I wonder if there’s a broader literary tradition here, but I can’t think of any notable examples other than contemporary ones. ↩