Producers: Steve McQueen, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Arnon Milchan, Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Anita Overland, Adam Somner Director: Steve McQueen Screenplay: Steve McQueen Cast: Elliott Heffernan, Saoirse Ronan, Paul Weller, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clémentine, Stephen Graham, Kathy Burke, Mica Ricketts, Leigh Gill, CJ Beckford, Alex Jennings, Joshua McGuire, Hayley Squires, Erin Kellyman and Sally Messham Distributor: Apple TV+
Grade: C+
The edginess that’s marked Steve McQueen’s earlier work is absent in “Blitz,” a tale of the German bombing of London in 1940 that’s beautifully rendered but so cliché-ridden and nostalgia-suffused that the word hokey springs to mind. It can certainly be embraced as a paean to resilience under fire—one might imagine similar works emerging about Kyiv depending on how the Ukrainian war concludes—but as drama it feels sentimental and obvious.
The film does feature striking visual touches fashioned by McQueen, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux and editor Peter Sciberras, like the surrealistic, rippling views of the sky as German airplanes break through the clouds to deliver their weapons. It also bookends the narrative with two harrowing scenes of destruction, opening with one in which firefighters try frantically to control a blaze affecting an entire block, and topping that with another toward the close, when a burst water main floods an underground shelter, setting off a mad scramble to escape to the surface.
One also has to admire the work of production designer Adam Stockhausen, costumer Jacqueline Durran and hair/makeup artist Naomi Donne, who capture the look of the period rather ostentatiously (there’s not much of a “lived-in” look here), as well as the visual effects team supervised by Andrew Whitehurst, whose CGI surely contributes a great deal to the images of mass conflagration. The score by Hans Zimmer is evocative as well, though it’s the insertion of popular pieces of the era that do much of the work in that department, supplementing Zimmer’s alternately mournful and exciting cues.
When you turn to McQueen’s actual script, you may choose to withhold full enthusiasm. The narrative is split, though not equally, between Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a single mom working on an assembly line at a munitions factory, and her biracial son George (Elliott Heffernan), whose father Marcus (CJ Beckford), a Ghanaian immigrant, was, as we see in a flashback from the thirties, detained by the police and deported after he scuffled with a bunch of white bigots on the way home from a dance club with Rita.
George and Rita are living happily with her father Gerald (Paul Weller), whose piano playing cheers them and his chums in the pub, but when the German bombing takes a toll on their East London neighborhood, Rita and Gerald decide that the boy must join the caravan of youngsters being sent to safety in the rural districts. He doesn’t want to leave, and, haunted by the fact that he’d told Rita he hated her at the train station, is determined to return home. So he jumps off the train where other boys have tried to bully him—he stands up to them with grandpa’s accusation that they’re all hat and no trousers—and tries to make his way back to London and Gerald’s house.
His adventures are a string of episodes, beginning with a ride in a freight car with three escaping brothers and continuing when he reaches the capital. There he meets some helpful people, most notably Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a principled Nigerian serving as an air raid warden, but others who are nefarious, notably Jess (Mica Ricketts). She lures him with a sandwich into the clutches of Albert (Stephen Graham), a seedy Fagin-like figure who, together with his bedraggled accomplice Beryl (Kathy Burke), leads a gang that loots bombed-out buildings and can use a small fellow like George in that work.
Meanwhile Rita, not knowing George has escaped his supposed protectors, hobnobs with her factory co-workers and is even chosen to sing on a BBC radio program aimed at boosting morale by showcasing talented ordinary folk. Later, when unfeeling, unhelpful authority figures inform her of George’s disappearance, she scrambles furiously to find him and finds assistance in Jack (Harris Dickinson), a stern but compassionate soldier. She also takes refuge in an unofficial underground shelter established by Mickey (Leigh Gill), a socialist leader who takes action to help ordinary blokes where officialdom fails them, where she consoles a young girl who’s lost her mother in the bombings.
That’s one of the themes “Blitz” often recurs to—the inaction of the government in meeting the needs of the populace. Early on Rita, George and Gerald, along with their neighbors, are refused access to the London underground for shelter as air raid signals are sounding, and after Rita has finished her radio song, a co-worker rushes to the microphone to demand the opening of the stations—which leads the broadcast host to quickly terminate the program and the sneering shift foreman to fire the troublesome workers.
This aspect of the film has a heavy-handed feel, as does the ghoulish centerpiece of George’s forced labor for Albert and Beryl, a visit to a bombed-out nightclub in which the still-seated corpses of wealthy patrons, covered with dust but otherwise largely unscathed, are relieved of their valuables, as oblivious to the scavengers as they undoubtedly were to lower-class folk in life. The underlying commentary on classism here—also portrayed in Rita’s treatment by authorities—accentuates its Dickensian vibe, and McQueen plays it with no more subtlety than one expects of the author; Graham and Burke exude the gross ferocity and dark humor of his memorable nineteenth-century villains.
Their performances, and those of actors in other nasty roles, are in contrast to the severity, often bordering on serenity, of cast members playing nobler, self-sacrificing characters—Weller, Clémentine, Dickinson, Gill. Even Ronan, though naturally agitated as Rita searches for her son, falls into that category. And the most impassive of the lot is young Heffernan, a boy used to mistreatment except from his own family, always wary and withdrawn and suspicious, even if his attitude doesn’t keep him from falling into danger. But truth be told, that very impassivity makes George hard for a viewer to embrace emotionally, even as one knows he’s meant to—see, for example, the bittersweet ending which lacks the wrenching punch it should deliver when the camera focuses on a body.
There’s a good deal to admire in the careful performance McQueen elicits from Heffernan, but not as much to relate to as one might wish. The same can be said of the film as a whole.