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BLITZ

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.  

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THE PIANO LESSON

Producers: Denzel Washington and Todd Black    Director: Malcolm Washington   Screenplay: Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington   Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Skylar Aleece Smith, Jerrika Hinton. Gail Bean, Melanie Jeffcoat, Stephan James, Malik J. Ali, Jay Peterson and Matrell Smith   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: B

The third installment in Denzel Washington’s project to film all ten of August Wilson’s Century Plays about the black experience in twentieth-century America (following 2016’s “Fences” and 2020’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” both superb) is of his 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner “The Piano Lesson.”  While actually the fifth of the ten in terms of writing, it’s the fourth in terms of its chronological setting, 1930s Pittsburg, and specifically the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), where his widowed niece Berniece Charles (Danielle Deadwyler) and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) also live. 

In the living room sits the titular piano, the instrument that once belonged to the Sutters, the Mississippi family to whom the Charles family were slaves.  It bears elaborate depictions of the Charles family, carved on to it by a Charles ancestor at the insistence of the Sutter who bought it to please his wife, who missed the slaves whose sale financed the purchase.  Berniece’s father had stolen the piano and was murdered by the Sutters in retaliation for the theft, and for her it is a priceless family heirloom that she refuses to part with, even when asked by her suitor Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), who’d hoped to use the proceeds from its sale to finance his church.

Now Berniece’s brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) arrives from Mississippi with his pal Lymon (Ray Fisher), bringing a load of watermelons they intend to sell.  But his real purpose is to take the piano and sell it in order to purchase what’s left of the Sutter estate, leaving behind his sharecropper status and becoming a landowner. 

The struggle between him and Berniece over the future of the piano is reminiscent of the one between Lena Younger and her son Walter Lee about how to use the insurance money they’ve gotten from the death policy of Lena’s husband in another classic tale of black life in America, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama “A Raisin in the Sun.”  In each case, the debate involves reverence for the past on the one hand and what kind of future a legacy should be used to fashion on the other.  But while the long, heavy shadow of slavery is integral to both, it’s more explicit here.  There’s an additional personal element to the brother-sister animosity in that Berniece blames Boy Willie for causing the death of her husband Crawley.

Onstage, of course, the action of the piece is confined to a single setting, the living room of the Charles house, and the past is recounted by the characters.  Director Malcolm Washington and his co-writer Virgil Williams have, in the customary fashion, tried to “open it up” for the screen, with gauzy flashbacks visualizing the history that Wilson presented in pungent dialogue. 

In this case, unfortunately, that blunts the drama rather than intensifying it.  A prologue, for instance, shows Boy Charles (Stephan James), Berniece and Willie Boy’s father, removing the piano as James Sutter (Jay Peterson) is busy watching Fourth of July fireworks back in 1911, and being killed—an event only later described by Doaker in the play, in one of Wilson’s most powerful monologues.  Showing the action up front reduces the later words to repetition; similarly, the flashback actually showing the first Boy Willie (Malik J. Ali) actually carving the figures on the piano as Doaker recalls him doing so similarly detracts from the strength of the language.  In such instances, and others, simply focusing on Wilson’s words would have been the better choice.

Another dubious decision mars the final scene, an exorcism in which Avery attempts to expel the ghost of Sutter, who has invaded the house, and Boy Willie battles the apparition.  It’s a fraught sequence, but handled with theatrical economy onstage.  Malcolm Washington, cinematographer Michael Gioulakis and editor Leslie Jones turn it into something much more bloated, with flashes of lightning in a dark sky and a bruising scuffle between Boy Willie and the specter that becomes much too literal, especially given the extreme close-ups in it.

The use of such close-ups throughout, in fact, is detrimental, though one can appreciate the desire to use camera movement to lessen the feel of staginess.  The close-ups, however, are especially troublesome in the case of John David Washington, who played Boy Willie in the latest Broadway revival and hasn’t sufficiently tempered the over-the-top approach that works on the boards in the transfer to the screen.  Jackson, who appeared with him in New York as Doaker (and was the original Boy Willie back in 1987), is more subdued and therefore much more effective, as is Deadwyler, who isn’t reluctant to let loose in Berniece’s angry outbursts, but keeps the emotion within bounds.  Fine turns from Hawkins, Fisher and Michael Potts, as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, add to the strong ensemble; the business between Fisher and Potts about Lymon’s purchase of city duds is an especially engaging digression, and all three have moments of dialogue that allow them to shine.  David J. Bomba’s production design and Francine Jamison-Tanchuck’s costumes are first-rate, as is Alexandre Desplat’s somber score, though there are intrusive needle drops.           

Despite quibbles, this is a very good version of Wilson’s masterful play, well worth seeing.  It does not, however, entirely displace the excellent 1995 telefilm, in which Charles S. Dutton made a compelling Boy Willie (which he’d also played on Broadway) and Alfre Woodard a fine Berniece.