(2008) A bleak, depressing, funereal film, containing graphic scenes of authorized brutality and self-imposed starvation, from director Steve McQueen of the Maze Prison hunger strike, led by 27-year-old Provo Bobby Sands, based on actual events, in Northern Ireland in 1981.

At the outset, entering from the outside, seeing from the perspective of a prison guard (his knuckles raw), who checks under his car in the morning for explosives (his wife anxious at the window), listening to Prime Minister Thatcher on the car radio emphatically dismissing IRA prisoners' claims that their violence and killings are political - they are criminal acts - we arrive at the prison.

A tall, lanky, young man with a head wound refuses prison garb, strips naked, and receives only a blanket before being escorted to his cell. Inside is another prisoner with long hair and beard; the walls have been smeared with feces. The inmates pour their urine into the hallway from under the doors.

During visitation sessions with wives and girlfriends they pass messages and receive contraband. The new prisoner witnesses the first crackdown by the authorities who drag prisoners out, kicking and screaming, to have their hair and beards shorn and dunked into a tub for a brief bathing.

In this manner we are introduced to Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender, who lost over 30 pounds throughout the course of filming to depict the spindly state of health from not eating for 66 days), arrested for gun possession.

The walls of the cells are power-sprayed clean; parents come for visitation rights. During a church mass, the prisoners ignore the priest, conversing amongst themselves. After being issued civilian clothing and assigned to new rooms, the inmates trash their new beds and few pieces of furniture. As punishment they are forced to run a gauntlet of black-uniformed police officers with helmets, shields, and rubber clubs; at the end of the hallway their oral and anal orifices are searched.

On the outside during this period, 16 police officers were killed by the IRA's paramilitary.

With an offering of cigarettes, Father Moran (Liam Cunningham), having "business of the soul," meets with Bobby in a futile attempt to dissuade the obstinate young man from calling another hunger strike. The previous fasting had failed, Bobby says, because of a lack of determination. Frustrated with the leadership as well as with an insufficiency of outside, international support at pressuring the British government to relent, this time he has 75 disciplined soldiers willing to die.

"Why should you care?" asks the priest: "You're already dead, right?" Since Bobby's unwilling to negotiate, demanding nothing less than capitulation from the Brits for his demand to be treated as political prisoners, Fr Moran concludes he's suicidal. He accuses Bobby of being "afraid of stopping" what he's been doing for the past four years during which (understandably) he's lost his sense of reality.

Bobby denies he's seeking martyrdom: "My life is a real life, not just a theological exercise." He then relates a story of how as a boy on a cross-country squad he'd earned the respect and admiration of the others by doing what they could only boast of doing, drowning a badly injured foal floating down the river, taking the priests' punishment as well.

As a descendent of Irish Catholics I felt no compassion or sympathy for Bobby Sands when I first became aware of his hunger strike nor while watching this docudrama. Refusal to negotiate made Sands a martyr, and after the deaths of nine more prisoners over seven months of the hunger strike, the British largely acquiesced to his original demand for recognition of their political status; but the violence in Northern Ireland continued for another two decades with hundreds more innocent Catholic and Protestant victims.

An individual's selfless sacrifice to the extreme of suffering for a cause in which he fervently believes doesn't in itself justify the cause. "The Troubles," centuries of conflict between the IRA and Orangemen in Northern Ireland over political and religious dominance, shares a similar unrelenting, irrational enmity with Sunnis and Shias in the Middle East or with Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. Current critics of the British government's treatment of Muslims residing in the UK suspected of ties to al-Qaeda accuse it of resorting to similar rough tactics as those employed against the IRA.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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