Steve McQueen is known for his radical movies, and whether you like it or not, Blitz is his least radical. More in its substance than its style incidentally, which is still captivating at a number of junctures; but the story of a separated boy and his mother trying to find one another during the London Blitz, seems a rather passée topic for the man behind Shame, 12 Years a Slave, and Small Axe. Yet I can also see why he wanted to tell this story, certain corners of it especially. And the Blitz is a particular trauma of British war history that hasn’t been reckoned with a lot cinematically. We’ve seen more than a few stories about children sent to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, but what about those who were caught in the midst of it?
For McQueen, Blitz is his World War II movie, concentrated on the home front and what life was like for working class and marginalized Britons living through it. It’s the story of George (Elliot Heffernan), a biracial kid living in Stepney in the heart of London’s East End, with his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller). A pressured Rita sends him on a northbound train against his will but for his safety, yet early in the journey he escapes the train and endeavours to make his way back home, enduring a lot of challenges along the way.
There are some very sharp ways that McQueen articulates the Blitz. The looming horror of the bombs dropping is a particularly good effect -he returns to rapid flying shots over the English Channel, the water becoming more chaotically rippled and indistinct as the small shapes of planes can be made out in shadow. This is usually followed by a cut to a silent reel of flowers in a field -a motif of the movie apparent too in its poster. McQueen is not a director to cast those flowers as a symbol of British serenity or innocence in this context -indeed elsewhere in the movie he emphasizes Britain’s colonial history. And yet that image of a quiet peaceful field is still juxtaposed against the destruction. Could its meaning perhaps be wider reaching?
It is opaque but it is intriguing, as are several of McQueen’s creative technical choices through the film. The way he gradually lights up a tube tunnel that George walks through alone while camped out at one station, revealing a curious scene on the other side where the dead have come to vigil. Or more potently, a scene that initially appears to be flashback to a happier time, as is occasionally employed for Rita and George and to give context to their background; a rousing nightclub with a cheerful black band playing for a rabble of elegant white patrons only for the real context of the situation to be abruptly, soberly revealed. The movie also makes a point of showing the various different kinds of chaos the bombings could bring about, as George is forced to assist a gang of scavengers, crawling through crumbling buildings, a tube station is flooded out, and a last act sequence sees George dodging the destruction all around him in a manner akin to Sam Mendes’ 1917.
But around the thrills, the actual story McQueen is telling and the characters caught up in it are largely mundane but for a few spare avenues that feel like the real statement of the movie though not it’s particular realm of focus. McQueen desires for the movie to share a working class and racialized perspective on not only the Blitz but the British home front, yet he does so in probably the most easily digestible way for white and privileged audiences. His elite and racist villains are very stark bigots and his lionization of women factory workers and black immigrant civilians is presented in a very narrow way. Occasionally there is an undercurrent of something deeper, like when Rita joins a socialist collective in the Underground tending to those who have been injured, impoverished, or displaced; elsewhere, alone in the British Museum, George is confronted by a racist display on colonial history, a reflection of the casual racism he experiences from other children. But his subsequent interactions with the flawlessly virtuous Nigerian officer Ife (Benjamin Clementine) who turns him around on his feelings about being black; and his befriending of another group of runaway boys easily converting them from racism feels quaint and unconvincing.
There's this disparity between the harshness McQueen wants to emphasize and a very simplified -borderline sentimental- outlook in the script; like it wants to be both a Sidney Poitier and a Spike Lee movie. Through flashback, we see the viciousness of what happened to George's father. In the present, we see cruelty inflicted on George when he is made Oliver Twist for the scavenging miscreants. Yet there is still a gung-ho attitude around his quest to reunite with his mother, that at times spills over into a symbolic affirmation of British wartime spirit that feels at odds with those more serious commentaries. A sense of romance towards the women and children especially who survived and there’s something very uncomfortable in that, particularly when you look at the relevance of the imagery in Blitz. The movie was filmed almost two years ago, but in the context it comes out in one can’t separate the grim shelled-out London and late sequences of a child running desperate for safety through the destruction, from the ongoing obliteration of Gaza. That connection feels very stark, and as such the messaging even more out of step with any kind of perceived noble airs.
I think McQueen wanted to make a movie set during the Blitz and came up with the actual premise largely as an afterthought. Certainly some of its ideas and beats feel like the kind he would have been percolating on long before, including glimpses of a black British culture overlooked and erased in its time -that clearly pairs well with themes he has consistently explored. But he sets them against a crowd-pleasing narrative that features creative techniques, but not a lot of juice. Heffernan gives a solid performance for a newcomer, and as expected, Ronan is the acting highlight of the movie in her working class dress and accent, though it’s got nothing on her recent performance in The Outrun.
Blitz may be a fine movie. It’s well-composed and at times striking. But it’s not much better than fine. It feels like McQueen reigning himself in and that is a disappointing state for him to be found.
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