How Osama Bin Laden must laugh at the idea of a "hunger strike". Explaining the slo-mo business to him would be like putting an F-22 Raptor pilot at the controls of Louis Blériot's monoplane. History has lent a new perspective to the story of IRA man Bobby Sands and his 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze prison for political status, recreated here in Hunger, Steve McQueen's explicit, but icily brilliant and superbly acted film. It is a lacerating portrait of an agonised period of British and Irish history; I have watched it twice now, and each time have been unable to forget the famous "Chuckle Brothers" peace-process photo of a grinning Martin McGuinness next to a grinning Ian Paisley. Theirs, remarkably, was the rapprochement that the hunger strikes helped finally to bring about, by redefining terrorist prisoners as political bargaining chips, whose release can be quietly offered in part-exchange for a cessation of violence. The question of which side is the greater victor is difficult to answer.One of the duller things about discussing this film would be to trudge through the issue of whether it glamorises terrorists. It doesn't. McQueen's movie, starring Michael Fassbender as Sands, paints the hunger strike as tragic but quite without tragic grandeur. It shows how dysfunctional and despairing the whole remorseless process was: how the Irish republican movement, angry and frustrated, chose to put self-harm at the centre of its mythology. The spear of the 32-county nation stabbed itself, in displays of passive-aggressive victimhood whose function was to motivate a new generation of fighters who would be every bit as resentful as their forefathers. The movie shows Sands himself as an intelligent, motivated man, but one who long ago hardened heart and mind to the consequences of violence.
Hunger offers a bold insight: that the hunger strikes grew logically out of the stomach-turning "dirty protest". Cell walls were smeared with excrement and urine to disgust, horrify and provoke the guards - a reaction the audience can't help but share - and this is where prisoners ate and slept and made decisions about the future of a united Ireland. McQueen gets across the nauseous reality of the dirty protest, and for a Republican leadership for whom loss of face was unthinkable, the protest kept alive a flame of rage and compelled an inexorable narrowing of strategic options...
For Full Review:
Landmark Nuart Theater
11272 Santa Monica Blvd
310.281.8223
310.281.8223
Dec 5–11
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