Film critics in the U.S. have collectively deemed Jennifer Lawrence as too big to play Katniss Everdeen in their reviews of The Hunger Games.
There have been several arguments that the 31-year-old, who plays the film’s heroine, had too much ‘baby fat’ on her frame for the blockbuster movie.
The reviewers of the film felt the character of Katniss was insufficiently malnourished to be living in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world and think she should have been skinnier.
Hunting prowess: The star was never praised for her fit-looking frame, with her character being a lean professional hunter in the film
In a review for The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy notes her ‘lingering baby fat’, while living in a poor mining region, as problematic.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir points out Miss Lawrence’s ‘well-fed’ body in the film, with the notion that her frame inherently renders the actress as too fat to play a realistic Katniss.
Referring to her body shape in a similar vein, Variety’s Justin Chung wrote that any evidence of the movie’s supposed hunger in the poverty-stricken District 12 ‘barely even seems to register.’
Further still, in what could be considered blatant sexism, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffery Wells calls Miss Lawrence a “fairly tall, big-boned lady” who is too big for her romantic interest Josh Hutcherson.
Character dichotomy: Critics think Miss Lawrence was too big to play Katniss, but there’s no mention about Liam Hemsworth’s bulky frame
He goes on to say that Liam Hemsworth, a bulky ‘six-footer or thereabouts, has no problem on this score,’ as the other romantic figure in the film.
One is left to wonder, though, isn’t that the point? Katniss struggles to choose between these two men in the second film Fire. Perceiving Katniss as dominant to one love interest and possibly vulnerable to another would be an easy way for an audience to differentiate between the two candidates.
Weighing in: Film critics have collectively said they think Jennifer Lawrence was too big to play Katniss
Perhaps noteworthy is the fact that out of all the film’s reviewers who critiqued Miss Lawrence’s figure, only one of them was a woman.
Manohla Dargis critiqued Ms Lawrence’s shape in her review for the New York Times, arguing that, ‘a few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.’
Miss Lawrence is, by all appearances, a thin, young woman. Her body type, while not mirroring her more starved looking peers, differing ever so slightly from the current Hollywood norm, is lean, fit and slender – perfect for the professional hunter which she plays in the film.
It is a fair assumption that these reviewers see Miss Lawrence’s body shape as deviating slightly from the exceedingly thin figures that populate most blockbuster films, in turn, perceiving her as too big.
Those who use the argument that Miss Lawrence doesn’t look authentically hungry enough for her role as Katniss also don’t seem to take into account human genetics in the population of our vastly diverse world.
As Slate pointed out: ‘Just as living in a world with abundant calories does not automatically make everyone fat, living in a dystopian world like Panem with sporadic food access would not automatically make everyone skinny.’
One of the film critics’ biggest flaws is their lack of critique on the male characters in the film, and their pointedly bulky frames.
Contrary to the arguments that the young Miss Lawrence was not skinny enough, there was little concern about Mr Hemsworth’s exceptionally muscular build, despite the fact that he inhabitants the same poverty stricken and starving community.
While it is acceptable to hold an actor’s physical appearance to a standard of realism in all movies, in this instance it appears to be more a case of pudgy-does-not-equal-pretty for the heroins on today’s silver screen.
Criticising Miss Lawrence’s slender, instead of too-skinny, frame is effectively rendering every woman in America with an average body also too big.
Those are dangerous grounds to tread on.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
