Watched: Hunger

So I've watched a lot of movies concerning harrowing subject matter, but I was still barely able to watch the last 15 minutes of this. Hunger is about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, specifically about Bobby Sands's involvement. But I think what makes this film so interesting is that Sands, played by Michael Fassbender, doesn't even show up until around the halfway mark.

We start with a guard soaking his bruised and bloodied fists and follow him through his morning ritual. We move on to the first day of a new IRA prisoner, watch him and his roommate as they fight back against their imprisonment in whatever ways they can. Then finally we get to Sands and his long talk with a priest before he embarks on the hunger strike that kills him. I think in some ways the the method is a bad idea if director Steve McQueen wanted the audience to empathize with and cheer for Sands he failed. But then, that doesn't seem to be his intention.

Considering the amount of detail and time he gives to the guard's life and his abrupt death later as well as the moment of grace given to an otherwise nameless, faceless riot officer, I'd say McQueen is more interested in showing the humanity and brutality of the whole situation rather than making Sands any kind of hero. This becomes obvious during his conversation with the priest, who basically tells him that doing a hunger strike is going to kill more people unnecessarily and in a smuggled note that tells him: negotiate. But as Sands tells the priest in his analogy to the injured foal he killed as child, he has always been the one capable of doing the awful things that needed to be done.

Then he starts the hunger strike and shit gets real. Like I said, this movie really focuses on the humanity of this situation, which includes: smearing the prison walls with feces, smuggling things in and out of the jail in various orifices, channeling urine out of the rooms and into the corridors, copious amounts of blood, dirt, and brutality. The detailed depiction of the way these prisoners are either cooped up in filthy cells or being banged around the otherwise metal/concrete prison brings home their pain and decay. But when Sands begins fasting the camera spares no one the gritty details of starving to death: the weeping, ugly sores, the vomiting, the gnarled sinews; it's all there and Sands leaves the guard's story and the other prisoners to hone in entirely on the breaking down on this man's body.

In short, this movie is incredibly hard to watch. But I think it's worth it if only to understand, if you any doubts, how harrowing and complicated the Irish political situation really was and what it means to sit and fester in a jail cell, or even die very slowly (Sands starved for something like 66 days) for something you believe in.

Also, Fassbender is amazing. The fact that he starved himself down to Christian Bale a la The Machinist weight is one thing, the fact that he makes Bobby Sands extremely sympathetic and infuriating is another. The fact that he is also an extremely handsome guy is probably irrelevant, but I just thought I'd put that out there.