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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Hunger

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#1 of 1 Posted 12/15/08 9:57 PM

From harveykarten Posts 744 Last Nov-19
To All [Msg # 23640.1 ]

HUNGER

IFC Films
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written By: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 12/15/08
Opens: March 2009

Americans under the age of thirty, particularly those without a sense of history, may believe that Islamic extremists are the only people to resort to suicide to further political gains. Others, though, remember the attacks by Kamikazi pilots during World War II, though these aviators may have dived into enemy ships more because they were ordered to do so than by a special loyalty to their emperor. And some Buddhist monks burned themselves alive during the Vietnam war while Gandhi, though not suicidal, resorted to hunger strikes to convince his fellow Indians to stop killing one another. All of these protests had an effect, but none succeeded in the ways that the perpetrators hoped. Yet another episode involving both starvation and suicide—also with few long-term effects—involved a small group of inmates at the Maze Prison outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, who were determined to end their lives in support of ideals. While their immediate demand was the right to wear ordinary clothes rather than prison attire, i.e. to be considered political prisoners rather than common criminals, they were looked upon by sympathizers as martyrs bringing the world’s attention to the plight of Catholics in Northern Ireland, men and women who sought either independence or, more likely, annexation by the predominantly Catholic country of Ireland.

Steve McQueen, using a script that he co-wrote with Enda Walsh, believes that comparisons can be made between the situation in Maze Prison and that in the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Whether the two can be contrasted is meat for further study. The principal motif of “Hunger” is to revisit Bobby Sands, the first person willingly to die in Maze Prison by starving himself—a self-destructive tactic by which the young man used the only weapon he had, his own body.

“Hunger” is a gut-wrenching movie that can be compared in its violence and degradation to Jonas Mekas’s “The Brig,” about a Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. To highlight the sordid conditions, McQueen begins his film by centering not on Bobby Sands but on two other prisoners in the so-called “H” bloc of the prison, a building in which conditions for the inmates probably compare to those found in Third World countries today. The cells are small, two people to each barren unit where apparently there is no toilet nor is there a way to pass time by reading or watching TV, lifting weights or socializing with one another in a mess hall. Excrement is folded by the prisoners into the wall, a practice which would seem to be a discomfort to no-one but themselves. The two prisoners shown early on, Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) and Gerryt Campbell (Liam McMahon) perform a blanket protest, wherein to protest the prohibition against wearing their street clothing, they wrap their naked bodies into a blanket. From time to time the guards beat the living daylights out of the men, who in addition have performed masochistic refusals to bathe. In at least one case, the guards knock a prisoner almost unconscious to force their scissors on his incredibly long hair.

One guard, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) appears not to socialize with his fellows but takes his anger out on the prisoners with a vengeance. He is dispatched later by a paramilitary fellow when the guard visits his ailing mother in an institution. The action shifts to 27-year-old Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who announces his intention to starve himself to death to protest prison rules that prohibit wearing street clothes. His anticipated act is challenged by a priest (Liam Cunningham), who engages in small talk before trying to convince his captive audience to drop his plans. (The long chat could have used subtitles for an American audience.) Ultimately, Sands does what many kids do when they threaten hunger strikes if their folks do not buy them the latest X-Box: he quits all nourishment, but unlike American kids, he dies in 66 days. (How a person can live without water for that length of time is not touched upon, nor do we know why his bland parents do nothing to try to change their young man’s self-inflicted violence.)

In today’s world, a peace, however unfriendly, reigns between Catholics in Northern Ireland and the British government which has held on to the rebellious counties despite all pressures, “Hunger” comes across like a segment of history with relationships to current problems of prisoners, particularly at Gitmo, is a stretch. Notwithstanding its only tentative connections to U.S. actions at Gitmo but with more relevance to Abu Gharib, the film should resonate with a prospective audience that does not consider the need for a score, even during the severe beatings, and who are also accustomed to bare-bones storytelling that does not fit the traditional definition of entertainment. If entertainment can be defined, however, in its proper light, i.e. as a medium by which viewers are pulled in and become absorbed by a movie, a book, a theater piece, then “Hunger” is powerful work.

Not Rated. 96 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Edited 12/15/08 by harveykarten

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Hunger

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