If you think “melodrama” is a pejorative, then you might not love Steve McQueen’s handsomely acted and shot and yes melodramatic WWII war drama Blitz, which sees the 12 Years a Slave director leaning hard into the hoary tropes of the keep-calm-and-carry-on genre that’ve been warming the cockles of British hearts for over half a century. It’s a surprisingly old-fashioned film from a director whose work has always felt vibrant and alive and, even when he’s working in period, of the right now. But you can see the method to his staid-ness when you lock onto what he’s up to—- reorienting this well-worn story’s focus onto faces of color that were long ago vanished into the background of them. This is a movie that slots right in alongside The Best Years of Our Lives while it simultaneously says, “Hey, actually, Black people were there too.”
For about eight months in the Fall of 1941 the Nazis rained bombs down onto London and its surrounding areas, a bloody campaign that became known as “The Blitz” and which left much of the city in rubble, killing something like 40,000 people. All of this is hardly news to anyone who’s either had a father and/or watched five seconds of The History Channel in their lives though. So what McQueen does here is twofold—he uses the technology of today (and the budget of Apple) to give Blitz a sweeping sense of verité that was heretofore impossible. Most people will see this film on the small screen (see the aforementioned Apple) which is a shame, because it’s hugely immersive on the big screen, rocking a real banger of a sound-scape. (Why it always takes war movies for sound technicians to flourish one can only wonder, but the whizz and screams of battle noise do remain inherently, if probelmatically, cinematic.) And McQueen proves a knack for zeroing in on images of memorable surreality in the midst of war’s horror—there are some whoppers of visuals scattered about here amid the quaking London rubble.
But those are the sequences that sporadically interrupt the bigger thrust of Blitz—although McQueen does this brilliant thing, a bit of suspense borrowed straight from Hitchcock, where he cuts to bombs hanging in midair over everyone’s heads every so often, just to remind us of the literally explosive stakes at play. Terror sequences aside though, this is mainly a story of a mother and her son who become separated during the bombardment, and who must find their winding way back to one another amidst its madness. A real bit of “tell me if you’ve heard this one before,” that, but at least McQueen knows it. And embraces it.
Saoirse Ronan (wonderful per usual) plays Rita, a worker at a munitions factory and the single mum to 9-year-old George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan, absolutely terrific). In flashback, we see George’s black father dragged off by the police and subsequently deported after a group of white thugs jumped him, and so Rita’s been raising the boy with her own father (Paul Weller), a good-natured pianist who plays down at the local club. (Cue a jazz scene that recalls McQueen’s knock-out dance-party “Lovers Rock” chapter of his 2020 Small Axe series of films.)
Despite those personal hardships—not to mention the missile-shaped hardships raining down on them in the film’s present day—Rita and George’s relationship reads water-tight. The boy gets picked on for being mixed-race outside of home so he’s become a big momma’s boy, but who can blame him—who the hell wouldn’t want Saoirse Ronan to sing and giggle with them before bedtime? And so it comes as a shock and a betrayal to George when Rita decides to send him off to the countryside with the majority of the city’s children, who have all been evacuated for safety’s sake. George’s not feeling safe among the racist bullies is not the first thing on Rita’s mind, when she makes this hard choice, but it sure is on George’s. And so the boy jumps off the train outta town as soon as he can wiggle his way free of his minders.
From there Blitz becomes three-quarters a Homeward Bound-esque journey film with George encountering people good and evil on his way back to his momma, and one-quarter of Rita worrying about a big BBC radio performance she’s been enlisted into by her factory big-whigs, while occasionally making eyes at a cute soldier-boy named Jack (Harris Dickinson, who is not called on to do much besides be cute, but obviously he manages). All of this is before Rita finds out her son’s gone missing, obviously—she’s not coyly batting her lashes after that information finds its way to her. From there it’s lots of running amid catastrophes, from both ends.
Among George’s many adventures, two stand out the most—he makes quick friends with a black soldier named Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), who at one point gives a stirringly cornball “Why can’t we all just get along?” speech to a group of sheltering cityfolk who’ve been letting their fears get the best of them. By far the most brazenly sincere thing McQueen’s ever filmed, it’s hard to not roll your eyes at this a little t this, but again—giving this speech that we’ve seen so many times before to this specific character carries genuine weight and meaning in 2024, so we’ll allow it. (Now if only the right people would hear it, and actually listen.)
The other much darker adventure involves George finding himself kidnapped by a gang of crooks (led by the ever and always terrifying Stephen Graham) and used by them as a pint-sized pick to get into bombed out spaces that the adults are too big to crawl into. A purely Dickensian interlude, this sequence contains the film’s most terrifying passage, where the motley crew finds themselves ripping the jewels off the fingers of a club full of perfectly intact corpses; people who all died instantaneously when an explosion sucked the air right out of their lungs. It’s a scene that feels teleported in from a james Wan picture, and it’s truly haunting stuff.
Episodic in nature and bifurcated down the middle between its main character’s paths, it’s possible that Blitz might have fared slightly better as a longer miniseries, where all of these facets were given their own room to breathe. There are several characters (hello Harris Dickinson) who could’ve really used a fleshing-out. I would’ve especially loved some more time with Rita’s co-worker Tilda, mainly because she’s played by the marvelous actor Hayley Squires, but there’s an entire side-plot about the factory workers rebelling against their highers-up over the accessibility of bomb shelters that doesn’t really go anywhere as it is.
With more time for all of these people and their stories, Blitz could’ve painted a fuller, richer picture for us. But if my only complaint is that I’d have liked to spend more time in the world that McQueen has created, and more time with the characters he’s placed within that world, then it’s not much of a complaint at all. And Blitz accomplishes the mission it sets out to do, which is plink away at our heartstrings while having us root for a young boy who carries a face unlike the ones we’ve rooted for in these cinematic circumstances before. McQueen keeps us trained on George’s individual struggle, with its particular quirks of living in color against a sea of white faces, and if embracing old-school full-throated melodrama is a good way to bridge that gap then so be it.
‘Blitz’ screened at the New York Film Festival. It arrives in theaters on November 1st.