The director of this film is usually described as an artist-turned-filmmaker. I must confess that I don't know anything about him, though the name seems familiar somehow, but this film is very much a piece of art. For a directorial debut, this is an astonishingly confident piece- as if McQueen's art background him empowers him somehow and provides the freedom to produce very bold work. That freedom works extremely well.
The film is stark and brutal in its portrayal of the conditions within the Maze prison. It focuses upon the human story and not the political context. As little attention as possible is paid to the rights and wrongs of the prisoners' actions nor the British Government's, they are simply laid out as facts for context. It is possible to view the film as falling into three distinct parts- the first establishes the conditions within the prison, the second is a long scene between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a Priest, with the final third charting his decline and death.
McQueen takes an unconventional means of making a 'biopic'. In a film which is ostensibly about hunger striker Bobby Sands, the main character doesn't appear until midway through. The first half of the film is all about establishing what life is like for the prisoners. There are long periods of stillness and silence, a microcosm of the boredom the prisoners endure. The degradation and inhumanity of the prison cells are starkly portrayed and the prisoners' blanket protest (considering themselves political prisoners, they refused to wear prison uniforms and were therefore naked but for a blanket) and long matted beards and hair emblematic of the bodily protests to follow. The cells are so vividly depicted that their stench seems to emanate from the screen. This is realism as a horror film. Terrible visual images of men smearing the walls with their own faeces and living amongst it, the grimy air thick and putrefying, their discarded meal remains eaten by hand and then smeared into the squalid mess already clinging to the walls. These men are brutalised by their conditions and by the guards and brutalise themselves, they regress to the point of animalism- a wordless, often mindless, unclean, base savagery.
The film, in fact, opens by following one of the Prison Guards through his meticulous domestic routine- neatly pressed uniform ready when he dresses, symmetrically laid breakfast table, checking under the car for bombs- into the changing rooms of the prison where the camaraderie of the other guards (presumably of the non-political prisoners) is juxtaposed with his steely solitude and absolute silence. As his hands are washed we see his lacerated knuckles clearly. The clean orderliness is a vivid contrast for what is to follow inside the prison and the officer himself is an integral part of the film's narrative. He appears only twice more. Once when he is part of an army of prison guards who forcibly bathe and cut the hair of the prisoners- this is little more than an opportunity to beat the men and is the source of those lacerations- and again when he visits a retirement home and is assassinated without warning by an unknown assailant. This is fantastic film-making because of the questions it provokes about the morality of both sides and what the viewer would do in those positions. No conclusions are offered, only questions.
The middle section of the film is stunning. A fixed camera holds Bobby Sands- forcibly cropped and sporting facial injuries- and a Priest (Liam Cunningham) in conversation. Their conversation develops slowly and carefully as though the men were boxers dancing from side to side, measuring the strength of the other. They smoke and discuss and the conversation turns to Sands' plan to lead seventy-odd prisoners on a hunger strike designed to force the British government to recognise their actions as political and not criminal. McQueen is very careful here not to preach a particular message, Sands speaks with sufficient detail and passion to convince of his own dedication without allowing the scene to turn into a soapbox tirade. The Priest and Sands argue at length about the motivation and justification for and repercussions of the action: "you want me to argue about the morality of what I'm about to do? For one, you call it suicide- I call it murder". It is clear to both men that this is a final protest and one which cannot achieve its ostensible aim. This is the only protest, the only significant action, the only act of defiance left open to the prisoners. The scene has gone on for ten minutes or more without a pause, a cut or a change of angle- as with Herzog's Woyzeck (discussed recently) it takes tremendous bravery for a director to pin a film on performances only with no recourse to editing whatsoever and in that vein this scene is a huge gamble but works excellently.
It works excellently right up to the first point that lets the film down. As the conversation draws to a close, Sands tells the Priest an almost certainly apocryphal story from his childhood as an explanation of his motivation. Where the film thus far has been grounded in realism and has had a clear intellectual integrity, there is now a pause whilst a fantastical element is added to offer unsubtle clarity at the expense of plausibility. The story jars horribly with everything that has gone before, undermining it and offering a concession to conventional cinematic expectations which is utterly disappointing.
McQueen uses the final section of the film to investigate in graphically close attention the process of the hunger strike. Fassbender's harrowing acting performance up to this point now becomes a disturbing piece of performance art as we see the starvation process played out upon his body. As Christian Bale did in The Machinist, Fassbender goes to extraordinary lengths of physical suffering, losing stones and weakening himself to the point of exhaustion to depict the dying Sands. His physical condition becomes genuinely sickening and you begin to ask yourself if this is morally acceptable in the name of art. What was an extraordinary performance becomes an unmissable one at this point but, sadly, the film deteriorates. For most of the final sequence the haunting physical decay of Sands is shown in stark silence by McQueen and this echo of of the opening section of the film works fantastically but at the very end- as Sands expires- McQueen begins introducing childhood flashbacks to the piece and some of the melodramatic story which disappointed in the middle third is acted out.
This is such a great disappointment, as if McQueen's courage failed to hold and he had to offer up a more acceptable, time-honoured and less risky conclusion to the film. It also moves the film dangerously away from the perspective of a fascinated but impartial and objective observer to becoming something of a hagiography of Sands. It isn't quite that, but the balance and thought-provoking manner of the opening two thirds certainly stops abruptly. In Sands last days his carer is changed from a medic who appears genuinely compassionate, though not necessarily sympathetic, to a huge muscular man whose first act is to show Sands the UDA tattoo on his knuckles and then to allow him to fall painfully to the floor. This isn't the intelligent and non-partisan approach which made the film so fantastic, it is heavy-handed and manipulative.
It is such a fucking shame. Nine tenths of this film is bold and artistic, it is a genuinely thought-provoking cinematic exploration and the remainder is disappointing, conventional melodrama. 9/10
