An intense and incredibly controlled film, Hunger represents a remarkable directorial debut for Steve McQueen (no relation to the actor).
It’s a visual and highly stylized account of the protests employed by IRA and INLA prisoners during The Troubles, culminating with the 1981 hunger strike that led to the death of IRA martyr Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners.
But you may not get all that just from watching the film; apart from some opening and closing scrawl identifying the events and a couple overheard Margaret Thatcher broadcasts, Hunger is as minimalist as it gets, showing us a series of events but never telling us a thing – no background on the situation, no background on the characters, little else besides what unfolds inside those prison walls. General audiences will simply lack the necessary information to engage with the film.
But more adventurous moviegoers will be richly rewarded. McQueen’s film can be broken down into a series of nearly self-contained segments. To open the film, he introduces us to a prison guard (Stuart Graham), who, I gather, is less than satisfied with his job.
Next we meet a pair of prisoners (Liam McMahon and Brian Milligan) who are participating in the blanket and dirty protests: along with other prisoners in their cell block, they refuse to wear prison uniforms, cover their cell walls with feces, and empty their chamber pots into the hallway (a magnificent extended shot showcases a guard splashing bleach and sweeping the hall.)
It’s not until about thirty minutes into the film that we’re introduced to Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender, recently seen in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), and you might initially confuse him with one of the earlier prisoners. He’s beaten by guards while they cut his hair and scrub him down, he broods in his cell while smoking a cigarette, meets with his mom and dad covered in bruises and tells them he’s “grand”.
In an incredible scene that includes a 16-minute static shot, he meets with a priest (Liam Cunningham) and tells him of his plans for a hunger strike. The rest of the film is mostly free of dialogue, but Cunningham and Fassbender get a chance to shine and they deliver, providing the film with its heart. Both actors are excellent here; their words, I have to say, carry more weight than the jarring visuals of the rest of the movie.
Hunger is an unqualified artistic success, but this also has a downside; it sacrifices story for style, and loses some of the specific dramatic weight it might have had.
During the climactic hunger strike scenes, as the camera lingers obsessively on Sands’ skeletal frame, I couldn’t help but become less aware of the plight of Bobby Sands, and more aware of the incredible physical transformation undergone by Michael Fassbender. Many actors have lost (or gained) an incredible amount of weight for a film; few have ever looked as close to death as Fassbender does here.
The style of the film also surprised me. Instead of gritty realism, McQueen favors a kind of Kubrick-esque eye for detail and beauty; walls covered in human excrement have never been filmed so lovingly.
I’m not so sure of the intent here, or how successful it was; I felt distanced by it. I had the same kind of problem (to a larger degree) with Nicolas Winding Refn’s not-dissimilar Bronson.
