Muriel Award, Countdown to Best Picture: #19 (tie)
Hunger [40 points/4 votes]
“Let’s face it: most political filmmaking sucks. The documentaries tend to be one-sided at best and dishonest at worst, and in either case they end up doing very little but preaching to the already-enraged choir. The fiction films are often earnest and condescending and predictable, the only surprise being just how long the third-act thesis-statement speech will be (pretty long, usually). So thank God for Steve McQueen, a long-time visual artist making his feature-film debut, who made the best political film in years by coding the problems facing political filmmakers into the project itself.
Hunger tells the story of Bobby Sands, the IRA volunteer who starved himself to death in protest of the UK ’s refusal to grant IRA fighters special political status. It is structured cleanly into three acts, an introduction and a denouement that pivot around a single-scene center point. The first act is abstracted, intellectual; McQueen focuses on the physical reality of Long Kesh prison, using prisoners’ bodies, the prison’s architecture, and the day-to-day life of a guard to stand in synecdochically for the political reality outside the prison. The third act zeroes in on Sands (played by Michael Fassbender in the first of his several outstanding 2009 performances), as his protest slowly kills him. This third act is personal, almost apolitical, showing the effect of Sands’s choice on his body without mentioning the politics behind it at all.
To make it sound more schematic than it plays, the first and third acts represent different approaches — not just to political filmmaking but to all political action as well. You have the big-picture approach, focusing on institutions and ideas, and you have the personal approach, humanization and martyrdom at the expense of broader understanding. And in the middle, you have the second act, a nearly thirty-minute conversation between Sands and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), in which the two men argue back and forth about the merits of Sands’s hunger strike. The scene is riveting cinema, rigorously controlled and beautifully written and performed, and it literalizes the tension at play in McQueen’s film. The arguments of Sands and Moran rhyme with the play between Hunger’s first and third acts, creating a meta-conversation that comments not just on Hunger’s methods but on the reality of politics in art and the world. And that’s all not even mentioning McQueen’s direction, which takes what could have been a dry intellectual exercise and, with a master’s sense of framing, editing, and rhythm, makes it vibrant, horrible, beautiful, and absolutely vital.” - Matt Noller
