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  But it’s noticeable that the opening, scene-setting legends say that the British government had withdrawn political status for paramilitaries without mentioning that this was a situation inherited by the Thatcher government (according to Wikipedia, the British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