Review: Blitz

Director:  Steve McQueen

Stars:  Elliott Hefferman, Saoirse Ronan, Erin Kellyman

In the years since 2018’s Widows, Steve McQueen has returned focus to the London of his upbringing, delivering via the BBC the seismic Small Axe strand, while also turning his attention back further, to the Second World War, offering up the dry but inscrutable 4-hour doc Occupied City, telling the storied history of Amsterdam in those years. Blitz brings these two avenues of interest together, and while its gestation will have taken place over many years, its arrival feels culturally weighted by the normalisation of Israel’s decimation of Gaza, perpetuated in our peripheral vision for over a year now.

McQueen’s on-screen text at the beginning of Blitz hastens to add context to the period of time it covers and, as his tale often takes place through the eyes of a child, the evacuation of children from the capital is of key concern in these words. But this focus tessellates starkly with figures coming out of re the ratio of deaths in Palestine, with women and especially children making up the majority of lives taken. Whether McQueen wishes these connections to occur or not, they’re there.

Blitz careers out of the gate in barnstorming, visceral fashion. An out-of-control firehose makes for a formidable first impression. The violence and ballet of it is remarkable. As a cinematic image it’s among the year’s strongest. But the rain of bombs that follows obliterates conventional form from the screen – in a manner reminiscent of Damien Chazelle’s abstractions blasting Ryan Gosling into space in First Man – turning Blitz briefly into a powerfully avant-garde onslaught. In these overwhelming moments, its contemporary association is all but impossible to avoid.

What follows therefore scans as something of a empathetic odyssey, asking us to take the abstraction out of global news by placing comparable events back on our doorstep, albeit drawing them from history. It’s a wildly ambitious piece from McQueen even without this connotation applied after the fact. Indeed, Blitz has drawn some ire for its over-busy storyline, which pegs several of its episodes to a line weighted with contrivance and coincidence. That’s fair to a certain extent. But over-ambition is among the more forgivable sins in cinema when so many dare not try. This is still steely filmmaking as one might expect from McQueen, but it’s also his most flagrantly populist, adding warmth, sentiment and action to a sprawling portrait of war-torn London that feels as indebted to Steven Spielberg blockbusters as it does the elegance of Terence Davies.

It’s 1940 and George Hanway (newcomer Elliot Hefferman) is a 9-year-old boy of mixed parentage about to be separated from his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) as London’s juveniles are packed off to the safety of the countryside. Not about to let himself become another member of Edith Nesbit’s Railway Children, George defies the authorities by blithely jumping from the train with all the gumption of those too young to understand their own mortality. While George begins an odyssey to make it home again, Rita simply has to survive an eventful few days in the capital as the Germans rain down terror on the city. No mean feat.

McQueen’s name was mooted recently as a potential successor for the Bond franchise. At the time he seemed like an awkward fit, but his flexes here make the association seem less of a stretch. There’s some fanciful stuff on top of a train for one thing. And if all this locomotive action seems to play frivolously with how dangerous these machines are, McQueen slams the audience with a gut-punch punctuation mark designed to show he hasn’t forgotten. It’s one of the year’s most daring on-screen shocks. Elsewhere, of course, there are the disaster movie shenanigans of London’s air raids, including a bracing sequence set in a flooding tube station. This kind of kinetic dynamism isn’t unheard of in McQueen’s canon… but one can’t shake the sense that he’s rolling up his sleeves here, trying his hand at some new moves. They suit him.

I mentioned elegance before. When Blitz isn’t in action mode it has the rich handsomeness of a Clint Eastwood picture. We’re only a week out from Juror #2, but Blitz has some of Eastwood’s way with lighting that makes the picture feel warm but not schmaltzy. Classical but beyond workmanlike. McQueen’s urgency is overscored by Hans Zimmer (doing a fine Mica Levi impression at times), while a stacked cast ensure that each episode of George’s journey home comes with some bravura personage or another. Blitz practically throws away the likes of Harris Dickinson and Hayley Squires (performers liable to sweep away entire movies), resting unexpected weight on the shoulders of surreptitiously shining actors like Benjamin Clémentine and Leigh Gill (getting all of his dignity back after Joker: Folie à Deux). Ronan, for her part, is dependably superb.

Indeed Blitz barely puts a foot wrong until it starts over-egging George’s tumultuous adventures. A subplot in which Stephen Graham mugs as a Fagin-like child-capturer flanked by Kathy Burke stretches the credulity of the movie’s second half. Not that chancers of their nature didn’t exist in 1940’s London, but it seems a mite too much for one lad’s story. Their inclusion feels like clutter. But, while this criticism sticks, if it wasn’t for this detour we probably wouldn’t have the joi de vivre of a big band music hall in full swing, which acts in service to another important undercurrent of class and race threaded through Blitz.

McQueen’s career highlight from the Small Axe series, Lovers Rock, took time to shine a light on Black joy, dance and musicality in ’70s London. Blitz makes similar excursions, through this aforementioned subplot and through a fundamental flashback sequence to Rita’s dancefloor flirtations with George’s father. Further efforts are made throughout to place Black Londoners into the context of WW2. Clémentine’s appearance as dutiful air raid warden Ife is the movie’s most overt effort in this regard. His confrontations with frightened, bigoted evacuees in the bomb shelters beneath London aren’t exactly subtle.

What Blitz argues – with conviction – is that the time for subtlety is, was and has for a long time been over. The way it resonates with current affairs backs this up squarely. With hate and discrimination back on the rise, intolerance can only be met with intolerance. We’ve too long been all mouth and no trousers, as Paul Weller’s comforting grandfather Gerald would put it.

McQueen keeps his reflections on London from becoming too misty-eyed. There’s as much here to be aghast at as sentimental about. His war-torn London is as desperate and depraved as it is courageous and moral. And through it all there’s also this torrid tension with Britain’s colonialist heritage, deep-rooted racism and complicit arms dealership that the country still wrestles with to this day (Rita’s job on a munitions assembly line doesn’t feel accidental either).

Grappling all these disparate elements of a city, a culture, a climate – and often all through the eyes of a child – is one hell of a reach. But to his viewer’s eyes McQueen nails it more often than he misses with Blitz; an uneven but more commonly gripping attempt to make all sorts of WW2 movies all at once. It’s shoe-horned dalliances makes it feel imperfect, but long stretches feel as major as anything McQueen has put his hand to.