Back to Blog Index

Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK): 59

Thought McQueen was doing something amazingly daring for a while, but it turns out to be only semi-daring. Basically, the third act kind of ruins the movie for me -- partly because that's the point at which it finally becomes the straightforward Bobby Sands martyrdom saga I'd feared (and also the point at which McQueen begins trafficking in symbolic cliché -- I would've preferred an insert of Mel Gibson yelling "Freedooooooom!" to birds taking wing), but mostly because the last thing I wanted Hunger to do was return to a strategy of tactile overload. A conventionally unconventional political drama would devote most of its first half to discourse and rhetoric, steeping us in the ideals being fought for by the prisoners as well as the cold rationale behind the Crown's intransigence; only once we could pass a short quiz on Special Category Status -- and had become intimately familiar with a cast of compelling characters -- would the film mutate into an arty, nonverbal portrait of human suffering. So when the Sands/priest debate kicked off, and continued well into the next damn reel, I mistakenly thought (excitedly) that McQueen was doing precisely the opposite: first abstraction, then ideology. In fact I started to hope -- rather naïvely, I admit -- that he might not actually depict the hunger strike at all, that we'd experience it only via its impact on those outside the prison walls. But no, that scene -- totally gripping in itself, of course; somewhere Brando and Malden are looking very sheepish -- functions more like an arch's keystone, and when it's over McQueen returns to his nearly silent passion play...which, for all its formal mastery, I must say feels a bit macho in its eagerness to shove our noses into the Maze's agony and filth. Why were these men prepared to commit suicide over what was largely a matter of bureaucratic designation? There is an answer, of course, but you won't find it in this movie, which is devoted to excrement and bedsores to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Watch FilmCatcher's interview with Steve McQueen about HUNGER

Posted on 09/29/08 by: dangelo 07:36 PM