Among the most versatile filmmakers working today, Oscar-winning writer-director Steve McQueen doesn’t repeat himself. A distinctive filmography that spans across everything mainstream and indie—from American slavery and Dutch Nazi occupation to the rhythms of London’s West Indian communities and a women-led crime extravaganza—stands tall as proof. With the elegant historical fiction “Blitz,” his largest-scaled movie to date, McQueen, this time, turns his lens onto London’s blitzkrieg that started in September 1940, when Germans systemically bombed the city for months on end. It’s an unquestionably harrowing backdrop with countless devastating stories buried under the rubble, a number of which McQueen compassionately invents and fashions with utmost humanity and a stirring sense of perseverance, building a resilient ecosystem of war-torn Londoners.
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Leading that “Blitz” ecosystem is the terrific newcomer Elliott Heffernan’s George, who soulfully graces the heart of McQueen’s Charles Dickensian tale like his very own Oliver Twist—resourceful, precociously observant, and unwittingly innocent, in spite of the atrocities his young eyeballs have to witness. Raised by his loving and hardworking East End mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan’s second enthralling turn this season after “The Outrun”) and his caring grandfather Gerald (musician Paul Weller in an inspired piece of casting), George holds onto his vulnerable sense of safety for dear life under his family’s roof—fragile, like the rest of the town.
McQueen certainly doesn’t mince words or visuals when it comes to those horrors that loom large outside. Right at the start, the ear-splitting explosions and the unforgiving images of entire building rows and neighborhoods on fire arrestingly take over the screen before we are introduced to George and Rita’s contrastingly peaceful domestic routines. Theirs might be a dreadfully familiar situation around different parts of the world these days, too—there is terror on your doorstep, but life has to go on somehow as long as you’re alive. George and the modest factory worker Rita, too, seem painfully aware of this reality, finding small pockets of solace and reverence in each other’s company. They play silly games, they cuddle, and they lift each other up to the soundtrack of Gerald’s gentle piano-playing until nighttime arrives and it’s time to take shelter.
Working meticulously alongside production designer Adam Stockhausen and DP Yorick Le Saux, McQueen gives us a sobering taste of that fright with citizens flooding the gates of tube stations, hiding by the underground rails until the strikes come to a temporary halt each day. Eventually, it gets too unsafe for George to stay with his family, so much so that Rita and Gerald decide to send him off to the countryside through a government-run program aiming to ensure the safety of children. The bi-racial child of a white mother and a Black father whom he’s never met, George unwillingly boards his train full of white children, only to be heartlessly bullied by some. Tastefully weaved in flashbacks later on informed us that that wasn’t the first time George was subjected to the often racist cruelty of other white kids. In that moment however, he decides to take matters into his own little hands once and for all, jumping off the wagon mid-journey and embarking on a perilous odyssey back home to London.
This is when McQueen’s very own Dickensian brushstrokes take charge in earnest, painting a complex and full-fledged picture of the era’s London, but one purposely inclusive of cultural and racial diversity that films depicting this period don’t often acknowledge in any real way. (Consequently, McQueen might even be onto something in redefining what the catch-all description Dickensian can come to mean in a broader sense.) As George finally makes his way back to London after a spirited yet heartbreaking interlude involving other runaway children, he crosses paths with people from all walks of life—those who are resolutely dignified and virtuous and sometimes, those who are circumstantially opportunistic or even malevolent. The most major of them who lends a helping hand to George is the quietly strong Ife (a wonderful Benjamin Clémentine), with whom George wanders the dark streets under curfew and heads to a shelter populated by other Londoners in peril. McQueen adorns the scenes between George and Ife with various sentimental grace notes—life-defining exchanges through which George ponders his racial identity and proudly announces, “I am black.” With this scene, McQueen underscores that however loving George’s home might have been, his white-dominated environment hasn’t yet presented him as a model for Black masculinity. In that, it’s genuinely touching to witness George settle into a more confident understanding of himself, in spite of a prejudiced world full of bigotry that rejects his individuality.
In one of the film’s more heavy-handed scenes that redundantly spells out the story’s moral priorities, one such case of prejudice unfolds before Ife and George in the very shelter Ife patrols, with the young officer having to didactically explain to some racist citizens the depravity of their actions. Still, “Blitz” gets away with this minor misstep with its raw temperament that often aligns itself with George’s innocently perceptive point of view. A much better scene that underscores the period’s racism happens in a flashback when we meet George’s father and witness law enforcement’s deplorable treatment of him. The scene certainly rings true today, and McQueen lets it play with all its harrowing contemporary connotations.
Elsewhere, a second major character—Mica Ricketts’ Jess—enters George’s orbit, tricking the kid into working for ruthless robbers who exploit derelict homes for valuables and steal jewelry from corpses under the rubble. In one of the film’s finest visual achievements and emotional progressions, McQueen gives us an ethereal glimpse of a bustling nightclub in the midst of a boozy party before the scene becomes a ghostly, dust-covered graveyard for these burglars—a horrific sight that George cleverly flees. Later on, the little boy also bravely helps a group fighting for their lives inside a flooding tube station—an emotionally and visually intense action sequence that McQueen navigates with clarity and panache.
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On the whole, there is an old-fashioned grandness to “Blitz,” charged by a cumulative sense of civic toughness and rebellious spirit that always spreads itself over a people, a city, or a country when they are collectively faced with unspeakable tragedies they have to endure. There are signs of that “you can’t break me” spirit everywhere in McQueen’s film, including in the redness of Rita’s jacket and lipstick, as well as the regal poise and put-togetherness of her outfits (gorgeously considered and designed by Jacqueline Durran). What lies within that defiant disposition is a familiar, almost counterintuitive warmth and optimism one feels amid their fellow rebels, one that reveals itself like a lifeboat in the middle of a storm when you least expect it. That’s the very warmth that the always magnificent Ronan beautifully sings about in a lovely scene through the gorgeous original ballad called “Winter Coat” (by McQueen, Nicholas Britell, and Taura Stinson) that actually feels and sounds of the era. And that’s also the very warmth you’re bound to take with you after McQueen’s dazzling picture. [A-]
“Blitz” is currently screening at the New York Film Festival and debuts in select cinemas in the United Kingdom and United States on November 1, followed by a streaming release on AppleTV+ on November 22.