Hunger

Steve McQueen – 2008 – England

Powerful, minimalist debut feature from director Steve McQueen about the hunger strike of IRA terrorist Bobby Sands in a British prison in 1981.  Strangely, the reason it is so effective, I think, has to do with its passiveness.  While depicting such emotional and divisive subjects, McQueen himself seems dispassionate, with no particular agenda as far as the political situation goes.  Instead, the brutality and depravity of the conditions in the prison are dwelt upon with a hypnotized gaze.  There are many scenes in the film, and yet somehow my memory of it has it comprised of a small handful of very long sequences, in more-or-less three acts; the first having to do with others in the prison before we even meet Sands, the second concerning Sands’ decision to begin the strike (the centerpiece of which is a marathon conversation shown in a single, stationary shot), and the third focusing on the deterioration of Sands’ body in the final days of his strike.  He died after an incomprehensible 66 days of voluntary starvation.  Normally, I tend to be skeptical of movies that depend on shock tactics to move us because I read those techniques as covers for deficiencies in other areas.  With Hunger, though, I felt the film earned its stars because it is strong regardless of the more harrowing moments of extremity; though those are certainly disturbing too.  The well-known physical ordeal that actor Michael Fassbender endured is the deserved pièce de résistance of the film and possibly his career so far.  Though probably unwise, he reduced himself to skin and bones for the film’s climactic scenes and it is undoubtedly one of the most unsettling things I’ve seen in a narrative film.  The film is not a treatise on imperialism or prison reform; nor is it a biography of Sands.  It’s a film about will.  Whether visionary or delusional, Sands is portrayed as a man willing to suffer what most will not because he knows the horror of it will be impossible for the world to ignore.  McQueen doesn’t seem to romanticize any of this; he merely attempts to get into the head of an extraordinary person somehow managing to take control of his own life and death in the middle of a situation that reduces others to quivering animals.