Steve McQueen is a filmmaker of exacting detail, grand emotional scope, and precise visual acuity, which makes him ideal for making films with historical settings. 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, and Small Axe are all period dramas crafted by McQueen, and now he is turning his eye inevitably toward Britain in World War II. Specifically, southeast London during the Blitz, in the film aptly titled Blitz, which McQueen writes and directs. It's 1941 and England is getting their metaphorical teeth kicked in every night by Nazi bombing raids.
Saoirse Ronan stars as Rita, a woman working in a munitions factory. She lives with her father, Gerald (Paul Weller), and young son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan). The film opens with a nighttime bombing, panicked citizens flooding the dark streets of Stepney and pleading with officers to open the local tube station so that residents can shelter underground. There is a single line tossed out with scorn about residents building bomb shelters in their gardens, as if everyone has a garden in which to build. Thus, McQueen introduces one of the central conflicts of Blitz: class.
Yes, yes, the Nazis are raining fire down on the city every night. But Blitz is less concerned with the war and more interested in its impact on those dealing with the daily cycle of going about “regular life” only to spend their nights cowering in terror, watching their homes and businesses be destroyed and their friends and family die. We’re used to seeing World War II framed from the front lines, as a man’s world and man’s business, predominately white men, at that. McQueen instead turns his lens inward, showing us the war fought at home by women, people of color, the elderly, and children.
The nightly cycle of sheltering underground only to face the aftermath of firestorms the next day is untenable, so Rita sends George to the countryside, where he will presumably be safer than in London. George, however, has no desire to separate from Rita. Heffernan’s performance is fierce yet vulnerable, yet he is rather poorly served by McQueen’s script, which turns him into a typical movie kid, determined to imperil everyone around. And he does! George is a death omen! George needs to sit his ass down and stop endangering everyone around him! It’s supposed to be sweet, if not appropriately, childishly naïve, that George wants to go home, but it also makes him sort of obnoxious, because George basically exists to Be In Danger, and he is Very In Danger, All The Time.
But George also represents the cross-section of McQueen’s interests in life during the Blitz. He’s from a working-class family, and he is biracial, a flashback shows his father, an immigrant from Grenada, literally sweeping Rita off her feet as they dance the night away in the pre-war years. George struggles with his identity, denying his Blackness in no small part due to rampant racism and bullying, at least until he meets Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), an air raid warden and himself an immigrant from Nigeria. Ife helps George embrace his Blackness basically by delivering a clunky speech about unity to a racist Brit being racist toward a Sikh refugee sharing shelter space.
The script is a real problem for Blitz. This is easily McQueen’s least elegant writing, and Ife’s speech is a prime example of McQueen’s blunt, heavy-handed messaging. “Blitz spirit” is a real thing people talk about regarding this time in British history, how communities pulled together to support each other through the bombings. McQueen challenges Blitz spirit by showing the racial and socio-economic lines that divided British society, but then he inserts these awkward speeches to show everyone pulling through despite their differences. FAR more effective is a scene in which a whole shelter sings while bombs fall overhead, faltering as they know it’s their homes under attack, but persisting nonetheless in a moment of communal comfort.
What isn’t a problem for Blitz are the visuals. If McQueen’s writing is the weak spot, his visuals pretty well make up for it. The use of color and lighting is stunning, and there is a standout sequence in the middle of the film recreating the bombing of the Café de Paris which is haunting. That scene is so good, it feels like a completely different movie (not least because George isn’t there, at least not until the aftermath). It’s also one of the sharpest realizations of the class divide still in effect despite the war and constant urging from propaganda posters to unify for the sake of Britain.
The acting is also very good. Ronan and Heffernan are excellent, Harris Dickinson stands out in a small role as a firefighter with a crush on Rita, and there is a slew of great actors like Stephen Graham, Erin Kellyman, Hayley Squires, and Alex Jennings who pop up and make their mark in brief appearances. I just wish the script was a little less hackneyed, that the dialogue lived up to McQueen’s beautiful, brutal visuals and the terrific work of the cast. Compared to emotionally layered, complex work like Small Axe, Blitz feels a little lightweight, despite the heaviness of the subject. Blitz is at once a haunting recreation of that era, and a surprisingly conventional film about family and community during trying times.
Blitz is now playing in select cinemas and will stream exclusively on Apple TV+ from November 22, 2024. Nothing bad happens to the cat.
