Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Hunger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve McQueen (2008)

    Hunger is set in 1981, at the culmination of the series of protests made by Irish republican prisoners in the Maze Prison.   The film describes the ‘blanket and no wash’ protests (the ‘dirty’ protests) and the beginnings of the hunger strike which extended over several months and as a result of which ten prisoners died.  The first and most notorious of them was Bobby Sands, an IRA man who was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during the course of his hunger strike.  I would be surprised if Steve McQueen didn’t think of Hunger as a ‘political’ film.  Like a lot of political film-makers before him, McQueen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Enda Walsh, uses the maltreatment of characters making a politically motivated stand as a spurious short cut to asserting the rightness of their cause.  He equates the brutal and dehumanising punishments meted out by the Maze prison guards with the wrongness of the British government’s position.  The film is politically tendentious in very obvious ways.  It’s true of course that we remember the Maze hunger strike as Bobby Sands vs Margaret Thatcher and McQueen, to give the audience its historical bearings, plays extracts from Thatcher’s speeches inveighing against the prisoners’ action.  But it’s noticeable that the opening, scene-setting legends say that the British government had withdrawn political status for paramilitaries without mentioning that this was a situation inherited by the Thatcher government (according to Wikipedia, the British government actually abolished ‘Special Category Status’ for paramilitaries in Northern Irish prisons a few days before Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister in 1976).  There’s no mention, until the closing legends, of Sands’s election to the British parliament.  Those legends present the hunger strike as a success because it led to the Thatcher government ‘effectively’ acceding to the prisoners’ demands (that is, without formally designating them ‘political prisoners’).  A more important and far-reaching result of the strike was surely the extent to which it radicalised Irish nationalist politics, strengthened the standing of Sinn Fein and increased recruitment to the IRA.  It would take a film even more politically simple-minded than this one, however, to regard those consequences as, without qualification, a ‘good thing’.  Steve McQueen steers clear of this complexity but consequently misrepresents the true significance of the Maze protests.

    As an artist, McQueen is best known for his films but this is the first one made for cinema rather than an art gallery.  The composition of the images may be sophisticated; otherwise the picture seems to me primitive.  It begins promisingly enough:  a middle-aged man, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), stares into his bathroom mirror with a look of glum self-examination.  Then we’re shown what we accept as the quotidian ritual of his leaving for work from his surburban home – the creak of his front gate, his checking under his car for bombs.  McQueen’s direction, however, soon begins to detach Lohan, a guard at the Maze, from his surroundings so that we focus on him exclusively.  In the prison washrooms, he does some heavy breathing and more gloomy stares deep into the mirror.  While the other guards chat and joke easily, this man sits alone, finishing his lunch, fixated on the foil his sandwiches were wrapped in.   No one else talks to him or even seems to notice his solitariness.   Hunger is remarkably but often pointlessly slow-moving.    A new prisoner arrives and announces to the Maze governor, ‘I refuse to wear the clothes of a criminal.  I demand to wear my own clothes’.  The governor’s silence evidently doesn’t mean consent:  he writes ‘non-conforming prisoner’ in the log book and the young man begins to strip.  He takes off his jacket, then his sweater, then his shirt excruciatingly slowly.  With each removal of a garment, he looks at the implacable guard at the door and the guard gives nothing away.  McQueen seems to think that this deliberate, repetitive approach will make the prisoner’s treatment more shocking – in fact it just comes over as falsely stylised:  more a case of the actor (Brian Milligan) being exploited by his director than of the character being humiliated by the prison powers-that-be.    (These ‘non-conforming’ prisoners were required to strip naked and given just a prison blanket to wear instead of a uniform.)

    Words, for most of Hunger, are a scarce commodity.  Then, from out of nowhere, comes a long passage of dialogue – not just dialogue but dialectic, between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) visiting him in the Maze, shortly before Sands starts his hunger strike.  From the moment the priest enters the frame and sits down, the camera doesn’t move:  McQueen sustains a single two-shot until Sands embarks on a childhood reminiscence – then he is shown in close-up and the priest’s occasional interventions are heard from off-camera.  I remember reading about this sequence when the film was released last year and the Wikipedia article on Hunger describes it in statistical terms:

    ‘The film is notable for an unbroken 17-minute shot, in which a priest … tries to talk Bobby Sands out of his protest. In it, the camera remains in the same position for the duration of the shot. To prepare for the scene, [Liam] Cunningham moved into Michael Fassbender’s apartment for a time while they practised the scene at least twelve times a day, sometimes repeating the scene fifteen times in a single day. It is the longest scene in a mainstream film.’

    Although the sequence is very well played by the two actors, they are in effect being upstaged by the fact that McQueen is determined to focus attention on the record-breaking length of the shot.  (Because we’ve already seen a good bit of Sands by this point, Michael Fassbender is less short-changed by McQueen’s technique than Liam Cunningham, who, to make life even more difficult for him, has his face in shadow virtually throughout.)  I assume that McQueen photographed the scene in the way he did to divert attention from the fact that he and Enda Walsh are falling back at this point on revelation and analysis of motive through theatrical wordage:  to deflect criticism that the scene is stagy, McQueen decides to make it ostentatiously filmic (and achieves that because the extended stasis is anti-filmic!).  But the exchange is crude and phoney not because it’s a conversation but because the words are written in a single voice – Sands and the priest are given a similar incisive wit and turn of phrase –  and in order to get across, in a sub-Shavian way, the moral arguments for and against the action that Sands is contemplating.  Sands’s piece of reminiscence is similarly, and obviously, morally instructive.  He recalls a school trip during which he and his classmates found a foal lying in shallow water, horribly injured but sensate enough to be suffering.   Only Sands has the presence of mind and nerve to put the animal out of its misery; he’s then punished by grown-ups who assume his killing of the foal is an act of vicious cruelty.  The memory is much too neat as a reflection of Sands’s current state of mind as he prepares to starve himself (the boy Bobby, like the man he’s become, ‘knew what I had to do’).

    A few moments in Hunger are effective through surprising quietness – particularly when the unhappy Raymond Lohan gets a bullet in his head while visiting his mother in an old people’s home.  The explosion of noise and terror in this becalmed setting is shattering yet Lohan’s demented mother responds only vaguely when she’s spattered with her son’s blood as his body slumps in her lap.   As Bobby Sands enters the last days of his life, the tender nursing he receives from one of the medical orderlies has what can only be described, in emotional terms, as a healing quality – although the effect is spoiled somewhat when there’s a change of shift and the nice orderly is replaced by a nasty one.  (The actor playing the latter telegraphs his character well before the orderly confronts the barely conscious Sands, who’s lying in a bath, with knuckles tattooed ‘UDA’.)   A doctor calmly, gravely describes the physiological changes occurring in Sands’s body as it degenerates through malnutrition.  Hunger really launched Michael Fassbender as a film actor and it’s hard not to be impressed by the commitment to the project that he showed in shedding weight to play Bobby Sands so painfully convincingly.  As with De Niro’s move in the opposite direction in Raging Bull, it’s the almost crazy courage of the actor – rather than the doomed hero he’s playing, or the skill of the characterisation – that compels admiration here.  That said, Fassbender has a charm and arrogance as Sands that suggest he could have gone a lot further with a better script.

    Some of the sights that McQueen and his cinematographer Sean Bobbitt linger on are extraordinary and arresting:  the abrasions on Lohan’s knuckles in the wash basin; the kindly orderly applying ointment to the bedsores on Sands’s back; the patterns of wire mesh on windows and on the shit-smeared walls of the cells; the pictures prisoners have fashioned out of their own excrement (lit at one point to bring to mind cave paintings); the deposits of chamber pots, emptied from under cell doors and pooling darkly in the corridor.  The images are less persuasive, though, when they become the explicit focus of the film-making.  A long sequence, in real time, shows a prison employee disinfecting and swilling the same corridor floor.  We can see how grimly futile his work is but McQueen keeps on showing it way beyond the point at which we’ve got the point.  It may well be that he’s wanting to make life difficult – and different – for cinemagoers; that he wants us to feel more like those watching one of his films in an art gallery, less like a lazy, passive movie audience.  If that is the intention, it’s undermined by the concluding part of Hunger.  In the closing days of his life, Bobby Sands’s mental life regresses to the cinematically conventional.  His boyhood self appears to him at the foot of his bed.  He experiences flashbacks to his childhood (one of these, with Bobby on a school cross country, isn’t just lame but inadvertently comical:  the shots of this figure in running kit, in combination with the chords in the accompanying music, make it seem like a Chariots of Fire pastiche).  As death approaches, birds are flying in his mind’s eye.   Steve McQueen may want to challenge cinema audiences with the visually unexpected but he’s shameless in resorting to clichéd images when he can’t think of anything better.

    19 December 2009

     

     

     

     

  • Never Let Me Go

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Romanek (2010)

    In Ivy Compton Burnett’s Darkness and Day, the ancient Sir Ransom Chase approaches death without any belief in life after it:

    ‘“I believe I shall be as I was before I was born.”

    “It is interesting to see that a man can face that, when he is actually confronted by it.”

    “It does not sound as if he had much choice”, said Sir Ransom.’

    In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, the principal characters are laboratory creations raised in order to give their body parts, and sooner rather than later their lives, to human beings in need of organ transplants.  Their situation is an intensification of, and a metaphor for, the transience of human existence; their acceptance of their fate an analogue of our acquiescence in our mortality.  This is made very obvious at the end of Mark Romanek’s film of the novel, written by Alex Garland:  the pivotal character, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), stands looking out at a leafless hedge with bits of plastic bag blowing in the black branches, and muses that perhaps the donors’ lives weren’t very different from those they helped save or, at least, prolong – that ‘Perhaps we all feel we’ve not had enough time’.  The ‘bits of plastic sheeting and torn carrier bags’ come straight from the closing page of the novel  The words don’t and, so clear is the moral of the story, that they’re superfluous – although they’re beautifully spoken by Carey Mulligan, who narrates throughout.

    This anxious in-case-you-didn’t-get-the-point finale is in fact uncharacteristic of the film, as is Rachel Portman’s excessively dignified and tragic music, which cues us in unnecessarily on how we’re meant to feel.  The score and the final message are at odds with Mark Romanek’s rather daring avoidance of the easily dramatic in most of what happens on screen.  The film moves very slowly, and without developing momentum, for some time, at least until Kathy and the other main characters, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), have become their adult selves.  Kazuo Ishiguro executive- produced and it’s clear from interviews he’s given surrounding the film’s release that he was considerably involved in its making.   You get the sense that Romanek wanted his approval – a mistake because Ishiguro, as the creator of the material, comes at it from a perspective so different from that of the audience.  The result is sometimes rather like a series of respectful recreations of scenes from the novel, that lack a life of their own.    (A sophist might argue that chimes with the predicament of the characters but I wouldn’t believe him.)  Romanek’s previous film One Hour Photo was weakened by the director’s imposing the sad bareness of the protagonist’s life on every scene, including scenes not seen from the protagonist’s point of view.  In Never Let Me Go, the palette is predominantly drained blues and browns, alternating with clinical whiteness (the cinematography is by Adam Kimmel).   There’s little sense of the boundary or articulation between the world of the clones and any other world.  This may be to stop us asking questions about the relationship between the two.  I can’t remember whether the novel did but the film doesn’t make clear, for example, how the sequestered education that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth receive prevents them reading about or seeing images of siblings or parents or any way of life different from their own.

    Nevertheless, the lack of detail about the set-up of this dystopian universe and Ishiguro’s preoccupation instead with its psychological and emotional implications for the characters mean that Never Let Me Go is sci-fi of an unusual and, to me, unusually interesting kind.  Legends on the screen at the start of the film explain that a medical breakthrough in 1952 allowed human life expectancy to be increased by a hundred years.  In reality, Crick and Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule at about the same time and the system in place for keeping people alive longer is based on the production of cloned organisms who, as soon as they reach physical maturity, begin their work as donors, their organs removed one by one.  They usually ‘complete’, ie die, after three or at most four donations.   The scale of the donor production industry is never made clear but we learn eventually that the education at Hailsham, the school attended by Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, was innovative and relatively enlightened.   (We don’t see any of the other clone factories but Hailsham is a handsome building in an isolated part of the English countryside:  the exterior shots are of Ham House.)

    The only way that a clone can defer their destiny is by becoming a ‘carer’ for other clones, as Kathy does.   But she and her close friends get wind of a rumour that ‘deferral’ is also possible, for a few years anyway, if a clone couple can convince the authorities they are in love – as Kathy and Tommy are.  At Hailsham, the students were encouraged to paint and write poems; each year a mysterious, vaguely Gallic woman turned up to select their best work for ‘The Gallery’.  When Tommy and Kathy apply for deferral, they know they’re probably too late:  Tommy has already made two donations and didn’t get into making art while at Hailsham, though Kathy did.  Nevertheless, they seek out and find ‘Madame’ (Nathalie Richard), who’s now sharing a house in a seaside town with Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), the retired headmistress of Hailsham.  When they meet the two women, Kathy and Tommy, who’s belatedly put together a portfolio of remarkable drawings and illustrated stories, learn there never has been a system of deferral on the grounds of love, that the selection of art wasn’t, as Tommy has hoped, designed to gauge the depth of students’ souls – and to verify claims of love.  (Here again the human analogy is easy to see:  the persistent sense we may have that our aptitudes for or responsiveness to art should mean that we deserve and are capable of a life beyond the physical, that we’re more than packets of biochemicals.)  Encouraging the Hailsham pupils’ interest in art, it transpires, was an experiment designed to try to persuade hostile human society that clones had ‘souls’.   Shortly after they receive this devastating news, Tommy makes his third donation and completes.  Kathy at the end of the film tells us she’ll make her first donation in a week’s time.

    Some people in the Filmhouse audience seemed deflated by the bleakness.  Perhaps they thought the title and the trio of good-looking young actors signalled a less unconventional romance than they one they got:  this was Valentine’s Day, after all.  In fact, the love triangle is one of the movie’s stronger elements – as is the fact that being as human as the clones are means having the capacity for jealousy and self-serving manipulation, as well as a propensity for art and love.  While they’re at Hailsham, the self-confident, extrovert Ruth steals the psychologically fragile Tommy from Kathy, the one who really loves him, and creates a rift between the two young women that lasts several years, during which Ruth and Tommy have a sexual relationship.  It’s only when Ruth is weakened by her donations that she comes clean to Kathy, whose own relationship with Tommy takes off from there.   I can see why Never Let Me Go is neither a commercial nor much of a critical success but if you don’t see the performances of Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield you’ll have missed some of the best film acting of the last year, some of the best I can remember seeing at any time from young British actors[1].  Mark Romanek deserves much credit too for the casting and his direction of the children who play younger versions of Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell).  The physical and spiritual resonances between these kids and the three adult actors are very rich.

    Keira Knightley’s acting doesn’t have the depth or quality of Mulligan’s or Garfield’s but that works for the character she’s playing and she’s very persuasive as Ruth, especially good when she chatters on to Kathy, getting down the hospital corridor with a Zimmer frame after her latest donation.  In the smaller parts, Monica Dolan, in her one scene as a nurse on a donor ward, creates a remarkably complete character:  the nurse’s blend of affability and inurement to her place of work is just right.   In her last scene, Charlotte Rampling expresses quietly and powerfully the headmistress’s regretful awareness of what Hailsham has nurtured in Kathy and Tommy.  I was less taken with Nathalie Richard’s Madame:  both her presence and her readings are too deliberate.  Sally Hawkins is good again, as Miss Lucy, the Hailsham teacher who tells the students what awaits them in later life (and who departs the scene very quickly as a result).  Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson have small parts as other youngsters whom the main trio meets up with in the late adolescence part of the story.

    It’s depressing to look at Andrew Garfield’s filmography on IMDB and see there’s nothing there between this picture and The Amazing Spider-Men, scheduled for 2012.  Is he entirely spoken for until his Spiderman contract has run its course?  Garfield is an outstanding talent.  It’s a privilege to watch his rendering of Tommy’s volatility and (in Miss Emily’s words) ‘big heart’.  He conveys the character’s emotional intelligence and eccentricity through movements and shifts in expression that are magically natural and penetrating.  His original line readings take you by surprise repeatedly – even in the course of a single line, he’ll strike one surprising note and then, as this hits home and you absorb it, another.  Tommy’s yells of despair on the journey back with Kathy from their visit to Madame and Miss Emily are such a predictable climactic moment that it’s nearly impossible for the actor concerned to make them work but Garfield does.  This outburst underlines both the fact that Tommy is a showier part than Kathy and how remarkable Carey Mulligan’s work is here.  While Tommy rails against his fate, Kathy is the epitome of the passive acceptance that lies at the heart of Never Let Me Go.  At a superficial level, Mulligan may appear to be doing the same thing throughout.  If you look deeper you see that this is an amazingly controlled and unselfish performance by a twenty-five year old.  She’s genuinely radiant and she has exceptionally eloquent eyes (she can switch the light in them on and off effortlessly).  Her slightly heavy gait here is subtly expressive of Kathy’s trapped situation.  The strength and delicacy of the connection between Mulligan and Garfield in the scene when Kathy and Tommy first go to bed together are beautiful.  They brought tears to my eyes several times – partly because the people they’re playing and their circumstances are affecting, but mainly because their acting is just so marvellous.  I can’t recall that happening with a new film since I watched Sean Penn in Milk.

    Postscript

    Twelve days later, I saw Never Let Me Go again.  Sally had read the book in the meantime, was keen to see the film and the Filmhouse had just one more show this week – Saturday morning.   I worried the things I liked so much would disappoint on a second viewing.  Instead, I found myself taking back most of the negative things I wrote above.  I must have drowsed during the middle sequence the first time round.  It’s here – especially on the outing to see the woman Ruth hopes may be her original – that there are interactions with the normal world:  ordering food in a café that echoes the role play at Hailsham (I’d forgotten that ends with Tommy’s lovely whispered ‘Thank you’ to Kathy for helping him out); peering through the window of a travel agent’s to try and see the original; watching an American TV sitcom, which triggers a memorable exchange of cross words between Kathy and Ruth.  The world created by Mark Romanek and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel, although it has an inherent melancholy, was more tonally nuanced than I’d realised when I first saw the film.   Things I’d positively disliked – Nathalie Richard as Madame, the score – weren’t as bad as I’d thought.  The school scenes built strongly – all in all, the piece seemed not an anxiously respectful rendering of the novel but organic and self-sufficient.  Sally’s right that it makes a big difference if you come to this film with the book – or a recent viewing of the screen adaptation – fresh in your mind.  If you’ve just read the Ishiguro, you can read what’s on the screen much more easily.  If you’ve just seen the film and are anticipating the wonders of the ‘Completion’ part of the story, everything that comes before seems to be a preparation for it.  And, to my amazement, the good things were even more gripping and elating than they seemed last week – above all, the riches of Andrew Garfield’s performance as Tommy.

    14 and 26 February 2011

    [1] Garfield in fact has dual British-US nationality and was born in Los Angeles but the family moved to England when he was three.

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