STARRED UP B-
Great Britain (106
mi) 2013 ‘Scope
d: David Mackenzie Official
site
A highly acclaimed British prison drama shot by an
independent minded Scottish film director, the maker of YOUNG ADAM (2002) and
HALLAM FOE (2007), one that uses a grim, ultra realistic style featuring
ferocious acting, but at the same time stretches credulity, seemingly in
contrast with one another, where many viewers will be scratching their heads wondering
why violent criminals are contained in such a seemingly lax prison environment,
as so much of the depiction of endless violence inside the prison is simply
never contained, where there never seems to be appropriate consequences for obvious
violations. As the film is actually shot
in the unused correctional center of HM
Prison Maze in Belfast, Northern Ireland, closed since September 29, 2000,
the irony is not lost on the viewers, as this was the site of the notorious 1981 Irish hunger strike when ten Irish
political prisoners starved themselves to death, including Bobby Sands, who was
a Member of Parliament at the time The
reason for his imprisonment was the possession of a handgun, for which he was
sentenced to fourteen years in maximum security prison, some of which was spent
naked while in solitary confinement, whose life was depicted with stunning
clarity by British director Steve McQueen in HUNGER (2008). This film initially has the feel of
authenticity, adapted from a screenplay by Jonathan Asser who worked as a
voluntary prison therapist at HM Prison Wandsworth in London, home of some
of the country’s most violent criminals.
The title of the film represents the prison terminology used when they
transfer a youth offender to an adult prison unit, in this case teenage Eric
Love (Jack O’Connell), a troubled kid from working class London with a
violently abusive past. However, nothing
is known about him in the opening except he is a new prisoner, where the attention
to detail is meticulously accurate, where he is forced to strip, his body
inspected for contraband, and given a prison uniform to wear. This begins a long, extended walk in real
time that couldn’t be more precisely choreographed, wordlessly unlocking one
set of doors while closing and locking the door behind, perhaps asking him to
step forward, repeating the process again and again as a guard leads him
through an elaborate maze of endless locked doors and empty walkways before
finally arriving to his solitary cell. The degree of locked down order and
professionalism maintained in this sequence quickly erodes, where the
conditions inside eventually descend into chaos and madness. While it never reaches the heights of Jacques
Audiard’s unflinching, near documentary realism in 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), and is near
unintelligible (no subtitles) due to the non-stop use of profanity and heavily
accented slang, MacKenzie nonetheless creates a bleak portrait of conflicting
prison interests.
This kid doesn’t waste any time and immediately gets to work
melting the handle of his toothbrush where he’s smuggled a razor blade, molding
the blade into the handle as a makeshift knife, immediately hiding it in the
florescent lighting fixture on the ceiling.
This sequence has a Bressonian feel to it that’s told in a worldless
rhythm defined by this particular environmental space, where he calmly measures
each move even as internally he is emotionally rocked by this major change in
his life. By morning, he’s already
verbally sparring with another large black inmate, where a bit of name calling
will likely lead to predictable results, where it appears he intentionally
picked this fight, publically, and in front of all the other inmates. Taking his food to his cell, he lies in wait
afterwards, pretending he is sleeping.
When another black prisoner from across the hall walks into his open cell,
Eric springs from the bed and viciously attacks him, knocking him out with a
single blow, dragging the man to the end of the hallway where the guards can
provide medical treatment. It’s little
more than profanity being spewed back and forth between the prisoner and the
guards, where no one simply talks, instead they shout and intimidate, where
every act is a threat, using unintelligible slang that seems to define an
unbalanced prison state of belligerence, where being a little mental can be
used to one’s advantage. By the time the
guards enter his cell with riot gear, he fends them off with the broken legs of
a wooden desk, using them as clubs, waving them in the air like a maniac. Even after he’s apparently subdued, he chomps
down on a guard’s testicles like a pitbull, eventually leading to a standoff,
but only after a prison counselor Oliver (Rupert Friend) insists that he attend
group therapy, “I can reach him,” he pleads, seemingly locking heads over the
issue with Deputy Warden Hayes (Sam Spruell) who gives his permission. Unlike Destin Cretton’s equally gut-wrenching
Short
Term 12 (2013), where there is a clear line between administrators and
supervisory staff, not always in agreement but the film adequately explains the
differing perspectives, this film makes no attempt whatsoever to provide any
rational view of the administrators in charge of the prison, and instead turns
them into bigger monsters than the prisoners themselves, modeled apparently
after Cruella De Vil, as their criminally heinous acts throughout are nothing
less than villainous. It is surprising,
however, to see female guards in an all-male prison facility that is this
violent, where the head administrator is a big-bosomed, cruel-intentioned blond
woman (Sian Breckin), using Hayes to run interference in the trenches for her.
It’s a half-hour into the film before we discover a major
revelation, curiously revealed by Eric’s improbable exploration into another
inmate’s cell on the same wing where he finds a drawing he made as a child crudely
showing a young child standing alongside his mother and father, all holding
hands, with the inscription, “I Love you daddy.” Meet Eric’s father, Neville Love, Ben
Mendelsohn, an Australian actor from David Michôd’s Animal
Kingdom (2010), separated from Eric at the age of 5, who adds something of
a psychotic presence to an already hysterical prison environment, as his
hair-trigger temper and propensity for violence makes him one of the lifers,
his sentence extended as he apparently killed another prisoner, where he
represents the hardened view of an inmate that will never see the light of
day. Eric, on the other hand, has only
five years to serve and he’s free, his Dad reminds him, so he needs to
cooperate and keep his hands clean, urging him to listen and follow
instructions in therapy, which is little more than anger management sessions, though
Eric does eventually acknowledge he was abused by a pedophile at the age of 10,
where prisoners may become unhinged and subject to making vicious assaults when
verbally provoked, where standing up for yourself isn’t so much a choice but a
mandatory prerequisite to staying alive.
Eric, however, has little regard for the rules and remains out of
control throughout, trashing his own cell as well as others, assaulting
multiple guards, cutting up another inmate’s face, yet has free reign to wander
the place at will with little, if any, consequences for his actions. This defies belief, where the film is not
without its flaws and has a clear ideological agenda, pitting the idealistic
motives of the “volunteer” unpaid prison therapist, whose unconventional
motives suggest his own dark past, against the more corrupt aims of the embattled
administration that holds no hope whatsoever in the idea of prisoner
rehabilitation, and instead routinely covers up their own treacherous crimes of
targeting certain incorrigibles with murder faked to look like suicides. When Hayes decides to implement such a plan
against Eric, his father Neville goes ballistic, forced to fight through a
battle royale of prison guards standing in his way to finally get to his son,
which despite the authentic tone throughout adamantly strains belief, turning
this into a kind of superhero prison drama, where the prisoners continually
exert their moral and physical superiority over the continually outmanned and
overwhelmed prison system that is crushed by the weight of its own
ineptitude. While the performances
throughout are stellar, this grim and tightly edited drama literally makes the
audience choke on the suffocating conditions, graphically raw and intense, never
allowing the transcendent release of Bresson’s A
Man Escaped (Un Condamné à Mort s'est échappé) (1956), continually
tightening the screws, allowing no space to breathe in this taut prison
thriller.
