Wednesday night in Santa Monica saw the LA premiere of Maze, an engrossing Irish drama focusing on the audacious escape of 38 prisoners from the notorious prison of the same name in Northern Ireland in 1983. The screening was held at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on Second Street, and was followed by a post-screening Q+A with director Stephen Burke, actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and producer Jane Doolan.
The film’s protagonist is Larry Marley (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) a convicted IRA operative reeling from the abandonment and perceived failure of the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze’s ‘H-Block’ which ended in the deaths of ten IRA prisoners including Bobby Sands. While Marley’s cellmates bemoan a very real human and public relations loss, Marley seeks to fight a different campaign – and painstakingly plots what will become the biggest mass prison break since the Second World War. Marley targets hard-nut loyalist warder Gordon Close (Barry Ward), and slowly but surely ingratiates himself with the prison hierarchy, gradually gathering information and ultimately identifying the prison’s fatal security flaw.
Burke unfolds the story in a calm, low-key and scrupulously even-handed manner, dropping the viewer right back to a troubled time that seems both far away and strikingly familiar. With the help of real prison sets in Cork, MAZE gets the tone right, down to the depressing 1980s casual clothes the IRA prisoners won the right to wear.
Although this is never really an exciting film, it is absorbing, thanks mainly to Vaughan-Lawlor’s performance. With concentration and pure conviction, the actor portrays the almost-monastic single-mindedness of an IRA man who is utterly devoted to his cause. We constantly see the danger as his jailer begins to let down his guard in front of Larry’s false charm – and with one assassination attempt already made on his life, living in a house with bars, Gordon is not a free man either.
Martin McCann, the only Belfast actor among the three leads, is compelling as Larry’s IRA commanding officer in jail, a quiet man but clearly one of great authority. In sum, this film educates as well as entertains, and provides a salutary reminder of how far we’ve come since the Good Friday Agreement.
Maze: dir/scr. Stephen Burke. Ireland. 2017. 93 mins. Currently playing at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, the Laemmle Town Center in Encino and the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Santa Monica.
