On Screen

Making a self-consciously visual movie about a political suicide is
a strategy for revealing the beauty and temptation of symbolism. What
else is terrorism but the body succumbing to abstraction? It’s not that
visual artist Steve McQueen, in his critically acclaimed 2008 Cannes
hit Hunger (his first feature film), is taking sides about
whether IRA hero and hunger striker Bobby Sands was right to die for
his cause. McQueen is not a moralist. And yet his symbols—for
instance, tributaries of protest piss channeled into the prison hallway
by the inmates, then painstakingly swept, in real time, by a guard
serving his own sort of term in there—are frighteningly gorgeous.
Frightening because as terrible as it is, you want to be part of this
world for the sheer, religious sense it makes. The forms justify the
ends.

McQueen’s historical subjects are three strikes at Maze prison: the
“blanket” strike, in which prisoners refused to wear uniforms and
instead went naked except for their blankets; the “dirty” strike, in
which prisoners refused to bathe, smearing their shit on the walls;
and, finally, in 1981, the deadly hunger strike, initiated by Sands
(Michael Fassbender), whose silently wasting body is the sole subject
of the last third of the film. Most of the film is without dialogue,
with two exceptions: the occasional interjection of Margaret Thatcher’s
radio addresses and a 20-minute central scene shot almost entirely in
one take in which Sands explains his motives to the prison chaplain
(Liam Cunningham). The supporting characters represent a sympathetic
look at the other side. A guard is shot in his mother’s lap (a
pietà, as one critic noted). A riot policeman, after brutalizing
prisoners in a gauntlet (governed by the horrible percussion of the
helmeted men hitting their shields with their clubs), is reduced to
tears. The cohesive, compelling tension of the movie is this problem:
If everything is so wrong, why does it look so right?