by Brendan Clay
Director Stephen Burke’s Maze is a restrained, slow burn of a thriller. Telling the true story of the 1983 escape by imprisoned Provisional Irish Republican Army members from HM Prison Maze, a high security prison near Lisburn, Northern Ireland, Burke chooses to maintain a narrow focus on the procedural details of the escape and on a strained relationship between two men on opposite sides of the Troubles. The first of these men is Larry Marley, a real-life high profile IRA member and the mastermind behind the escape.
Larry was a participant in the “blanket protests” where prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms, dressed only in blankets, and remained confined to their cells. This was the larger context for the “dirty protest” and two hunger strikes. The protesters demands were to be treated as political prisoners, with privileges such as being allowed to wear civilian clothes. The film begins in the wake of the end of the protests after ten hunger strikers have died and Larry is returned to the general population, which includes both IRA and Ulster Protestants.
Some concessions, such as allowing civilian dress, have been made quietly by the government and those in charge of the prison, but the demands were not met in a formal way. Dublin-born actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor plays Larry as a man grappling with survivor’s guilt he will barely acknowledge and a smoldering internal fire of righteous anger for the cause that he mostly keeps hidden under a mild-mannered facade.
The main goal of the escape is to increase morale and embarrass their opposition to counteract the potential emotional downturn as a consequence of the not unambiguously successful results of the protests. On a personal level, Larry comes off as needing to have a mission to stay sane as much as a shark needs to swim to live.
The other player in the film’s main relationship is Gordon, a jailer played by also Dublin-born Barry Ward. Gordon, an invented character meant to stand in for the prison staff in general, is a Unionist whose brother was killed in the line of duty by the provisional IRA, and Larry has to cozy up to him and make friends as part of the escape plan. Gordon is neither entirely resistant nor an eager dupe, and their slow subtle bonding over the strain their life choices have placed on their respective families, is played in an interesting way.
Their discussions never quite become a friendship, and the two are visibly tense and on their guard throughout, but there are blink and you’ll miss them moments, where the two make a potential human connection before retreating to their ideological corners. Ward plays Gordon with a great deal of sympathy and humanity, which helps undercut the potential in the story to glorify IRA violence.
Another way the film deals with its controversial subject matter is in its fairly clinical perspective. The narrative does not take sides and there is no obvious emotional manipulation. When IRA fighters and prisoners commit acts of violence, the camera doesn’t linger, and the consequences of the violence are clearly expressed, but the film leaves the decision up to the viewer to decide what it all means.
It’s a risky choice in terms of entertainment, and frankly with lesser actors than Vaughan-Lawlor and Ward, the film could have been easily boring, but it mostly works. The details of the escape are interesting in their own right, and the film does a good job laying out just what the viewer needs to know without overloading them with exposition. All in all, Maze is a decent watch about a difficult but interesting subject.
Maze will be opening in Philadelphia this March
brendanjamesclay@gmail.com