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Film Friday: Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever
Sometimes in life things happen and there isn’t a clear lesson to learn. Perhaps you’ll find yourself absolutely destroyed by a case of the flu for a couple of weeks and think “I should have had a flu shot” is the lesson, and then you’ll remember that you were on the other side of the country when you became sick, so the flu shot probably wouldn’t have helped. But because you’re human, and we humans like patterns, you’ll probably come up with something else—be it stress or not eating your vitamins—to blame, “learn from,” and feel satisfied.
The point we’re making—in a roundabout fashion—is that things in life which sound simple can often have far more hidden complexity than can be cleanly summarized, and one of the strengths of director Steve McQueen’s Hunger is that he seems to realize it. In the “simple” story of IRA member Bobby Sand’s 1981 hunger strike, McQueen does his best to provide a film that doesn’t paste on a message, lesson, or judgement, instead asking us to watch and consider the people, not the politics, who are part of the story (and it’s the very strength of the performances from the entire cast—not only Michael Fassbender as Sands—which allow this).
Of course, this kind of “cold” direction can have the odd side-effect of making what we come into the film with a huge part of the patterns we decode from it—depending on your sympathies, amongst possible judgements, you might see the guards as brutal monsters even if McQueen tries to show the effect their job has on their lives. As a result, as interesting as we found Hunger, we couldn’t help but find it ultimately too distant to help us “see both sides,” instead sticking rigidly to our own feelings on the matter, already informed by the “Troubles” as a whole. Our advice? Do your best to go into Hunger with a clean slate—certainly don’t try to work out “goodies and baddies”—and you’ll enjoy it a lot more.
Surprisingly, this week’s big release, Observe and Report, also has its fair share of hidden complexities. Though pitched hard by trailers as the latest mall-cop comedy (our most deserving new genre), reviews, such as Norm Wilner’s four N review at NOW, reference Taxi Driver more freely than Paul Blart—”it only plays as a comedy if you’re willing to block out the unpleasant subtext in every single scene,” he argues.
Also out this week—Tulpan, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Shall We Kiss, Duska, Two Lovers, Jerichow, and It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks, with festivals including the Images Film Festival, and the Reelworld Film Festival, opening this Wednesday.