Around
2008, British director Steve McQueen unveiled the shocking Caméra d'Or winning historical drama Hunger with Michael Fassbender,
chronicling Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer and MP Bobby Sands’ 1981
IRA hunger strike and the no wash protest.
The film took place within the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze in
Northern Ireland and was an unbroken gaze into one man starving himself to
death until you’re left in a catatonic state of abject horror.
Nine years
later, Dublin writer-director Stephen Burke would revisit Her Majesty’s Prison
Maze with the aptly titled Maze: a
fictionalized account of the major 1983 prison breakout which followed the tail
end of the Irish hunger strike. While treading
familiar ground, the two films within Her Majesty’s Maze couldn’t be more different.
Where McQueen’s film was a chilly and distant slice of unfeeling
visceral horror, Burke’s briskly paced film gets into the prison blocks with Larry
Marley (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) who engineered the prison escape which let loose
some thirty-eight IRA prisoners from the high security prison.
A tense,
often claustrophobic and monochromatic looking thriller echoing the visual
styles of David Fincher or The Wachowskis, Burke’s account of the interior of
the Maze is a thoroughly engaging and
engrossing prison movie. Closer to Don
Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 than
McQueen’s deliberately deadening experience for all of the interpersonal
relations and exchanges between prisoner and warden, in this case Gordon Close
(Barry Ward), Maze makes a great
companion piece to McQueen’s film by continuing the true story while finding its
own cinematic footing.
Performances
by both lead actors are strong and in microcosm represent two ordinary men
trapped on opposite sides of the political fence and pay special attention to how
the ordeal affects each character’s marital lives. Both men just want to return home to their
wives but are bound by a situation they must fight that is seemingly beyond
both man’s control. As a loose unspoken
bond forms between the two which will invariably be betrayed when the time comes,
there’s a loose allegory of the impending peace talks that will commence as the
men recognize their own respective loyalties to their causes while sharing a
kindred human bond that will hopefully overcome the political boundaries.
Nominated
for four Irish film and television Academy Awards, Burke’s film which proved to
be a critical and commercial hit in Ireland now makes its stateside splash for domestic
viewers to see for themselves. Some may
find the thick Irish accents a bit trying to get used to, though English subtitles
are provided rather than redubbing the dialogue ala the US release of Danny
Boyle’s Trainspotting.
Though some critics from the outset
complained the film came off as one-sided, for my money it gave equal measure
to both sides while trying to find a meeting of the minds somewhere in the middle. As it stands, it’s a solid prison movie and
an important chapter in the ongoing evolution of Irish world cinema.
--Andrew Kotwicki