‘Blitz’ Review: Steve McQueen’s Sentimental War Epic Is the Only of His Films That Feels Like It Could’ve Been Made by Somebody Else
It’s strange to discover that “Blitz” is the most anonymous movie that Steve McQueen has made thus far, as this pseudo-Dickensian epic — the story of a half-Grenadian boy’s quest to reunite with his guilt-ridden single mother (Saoirse Ronan) after she evacuates him out of London in the fall of 1940 — would appear to be an ideal showcase for his singular vision as a filmmaker.
Drawn towards subjects that allow him to interrogate and expand upon historical notions of resilience, the “Hunger” director has frequently returned to portraits of life during wartime over the course of his career as both a visual artist and commercial auteur. This one, set at the height of the stiff upper lip spirit that McQueen is eager to question for its cracks, offers such a natural canvas for his favorite subject that it can seem like he’s spent the last 20 years waiting for the budget to paint on it.
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And yet “Blitz” is the first one of McQueen’s features that feels like it could’ve been made by someone else (less identifiable talents like Sam Mendes and Edward Berger come to mind). Wantonly staid and sentimental where his earlier work was austere and intuitive, “Blitz” is old-fashioned in its design even when it’s artful in its telling, and broadly shaped around Britain’s most familiar tropes even as it’s lovingly specific to the experience of its young hero — a biracial kid at a time that has seldom been depicted with any trace of color.
It might feel like two completely different films if not for how well its scattered plots combine to embody the friction between “Keep Calm and Carry On” stoicism and the harsh realities of living under siege. What we get instead is a single film divided against itself; a patchwork of episodes, several of them staged as only McQueen would, that fail to equal the sum of their parts. In its best moments, most of which are trained on the delicate stillness of Ronan’s face, “Blitz” burns with the unmistakable humanity at the core of McQueen’s work.
Just as often, however, the movie’s studied classicism — which has to evoke the hoariest cliches of British war dramas in order to advance them — eats away at the naked emotionality that’s meant to hold this story together. Released into a world in which innocent people are under siege once more, “Blitz” falls short of its own terrible relevance because its own narrative framework isn’t as resilient as either of the people who hold it in place.
Accessible enough for a child to understand even when it’s too elliptical to reward their interest (and/or too scary for them to enjoy), “Blitz” is at its most believable when its characters are trying not to break. Ronan is nothing short of extraordinary in a rare supporting role, and the dead-eyed look on her face when her Rita is first introduced — dried streaks of mascara trailing down her cheeks like dirt as she clutches her son George in bed — radiates enough heartache and helplessness to carry the rest of the movie that follows. Some filmmakers work a lifetime without capturing a moment as gutting as the one where Rita slips out of the bedroom and catches her breath against the wall, the fear of what’s to come flashing over her like a shadow that she can never allow George to see.
McQueen’s script doesn’t waste any time, but the director savors these moments of domestic quietude as much as Rita and George do. There’s a bittersweet humility to the various scenes where mother, son, and his ultra-stoic grandfather (musician Paul Weller) sit around the living room piano and sing old ditties to each other — this is all the happiness they’re hoping to keep. But the music they make together has started to get drowned out by the air-raid sirens that scream across the city most nights, and after a particularly harrowing ordeal ends with the family’s entire neighborhood forcing their way into the Stepney Green tube station (despite an inflexible policeman’s insistence that it’s not an official shelter), Rita makes the difficult decision to evacuate her only child out of harm’s way.
McQueen graces Rita with the same rich texture and rare tenderness that he’s reliably brought to his characters in the past, and there isn’t a parent alive who won’t shudder at the dilemma that confronts her in these opening scenes. Which would be a better display of the resolve that her country demands: Sending her child to the countryside, perhaps never to see him again, or keeping him at home, undaunted but under constant threat of death? Was the copper at Stepney Green strong for refusing to open the gates, or strong for conceding to the emergency at hand? What does resilience look like in a state of existential distress?
McQueen has always preferred to answer that question with the same multi-faceted approach with which he tends to ask it in the first place, and Rita’s decision to put George on a train the next morning — “I hate you!” are the last words he shouts at his mom before running aboard — allows the filmmaker to do the same here, as “Blitz” splits into two unequal stories that run along parallel tracks. He isn’t interested in passing any moral judgment on these people; Rita’s instant regret is as rational as George’s decision to jump off the train and start his short odyssey back to London. On the contrary, McQueen splits mother and son apart so that he can study what togetherness really means to a racist nation that promotes solidarity as its greatest defense. And also, with a bluntness that suggests McQueen has always been a little softer than he seems, so he can argue that an empire’s pride is worth nothing without the love that its people have for each other.
McQueen isn’t a natural director of children, but little Elliot Heffernan — dignified and memorable in his first screen performance — allows George to elude the school play stiffness that afflicts all of the other kids around him. Appreciably bright even when he’s scowling (which is a lot), and enduringly innocent even though he’s been the subject of open bigotry since the day he was born, George is sent on a quest that will all but determine his faith in humanity, and Heffernan ensures that his character continues to feel like a real person even as his journey slows into a ham-fisted parade of angels and demons.
The cruelty he encounters, even under the collective threat of extinction, is almost as shocking to him as the kindness that survives the same circumstances. It also tends to be much clunkier. One example of many: The Fagin-like thief who ropes George into his crime syndicate (Stephen Graham) sucks the air from the movie’s emotional reality, while the Nigerian-born air-raid warden who inspires George to embrace his Blackness (composer Benjamin Clementine, radiating a beautifully visceral warmth) leaves an impression that seeps into every sequence that follows, a godsend to a film whose parallel storylines can be just as disjointed on their own as they are when McQueen tries to wend them together.
They sure are disjointed when he wends them together, though. Rita’s individual scenes range from the engaging to the sublime, the latter epitomized by the bit where Rita takes a break from her shift at the munitions factory to to perform an original song for the BBC radio; McQueen draws in on Ronan with the same rapture that Carey Mulligan inspired from his camera in “Shame,” and the actress’ voice strikes just the right balance between audible thinness and unquantifiable depth. But the timeline soon gets jumbled as “Blitz” cuts back and forth between its plots, and Rita’s emotions — so instrumental to the constricted mosaic that McQueen is trying to paint here — grow confused by the when of it all.
McQueen’s script occasionally reminds us that George left “this morning” or that Rita just “saw him yesterday,” but such clues are insufficiently immediate context for us to appreciate how she might feel when she goes to the pub with her friends (later on the same day George was evacuated?), or how long every hour must feel to her while her son is on the lam. Welcome as Harris Dickinson is in any film, and much as his auxiliary firefighter Rita lends “Blitz” a broader sense of community, his unrequited crush on Rita only distracts from the urgency of her crisis.
The heart beats on even under bombardment, as the Blitz spirit demands that it must, but the movie’s layered mosaic of feeling comes at the expense of its emotional rhythm — a rhythm that’s ironically and perversely disrupted even further by a handful of exquisite flashbacks and asides that also happen to be the most “Steve McQueen” moments here. The tour de force sequence at the Café de Paris is a perfect example, as “Blitz” takes leave of its characters to weave its way through a bumping, multiracial jazz club in the minutes before it’s bombed into oblivion. Shot in a stunning oner that shines a light on real-life figures like bandleader Snakehips Johnson, this marvelous aside is vintage McQueen in both its virtuosity and its use of music to bring history back to life — Sam Mendes could never.
If the Café de Paris fleshes out the film’s vision of London during the Blitz (the attendees are certainly displaying their own kind of strength and solidarity), such narrative detours push against the magnetic force that should be pulling Rita and George back together, and several of the movie’s biggest setpieces fail to offer such self-contained rewards. The sequence where George has to dodge a dive-bombing Nazi plane — rendered garishly modern by its liberal use of CGI — is too egregious even for the exaggerated reality of McQueen’s film, which is never vigorous enough to support the sense of adventure its spectacle requires (despite Hans Zimmer’s best efforts).
Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography does what it can to create a thematically cohesive veneer, as vintage lenses and digital saturation dovetail with McQueen’s efforts to fix the false whiteness of mid-century British cinema through color instead of realism. For all of its heartache, this fable-like saga is as heightened and romantic as any of the classic movies it’s working to correct; it says “this is what London actually used to look like” by restoring a vision of the city that has only ever existed on screen.
That tracks, but the relationship between the film’s two most important people is almost fatally diluted by everything that “Blitz” is trying to do around them, and by the sea of small details that each leave a greater impression. The sympathy that a biracial stranger named Jess (Mica Ricketts) wishes she could show the boy without a sinister agenda. The red corduroy jacket that Rita wears to the station like a suit of armor, and the love implicit in her father’s decision to ignore the fact that she’s been crying.
But as much as “Blitz” struggles to balance the love that binds its characters together with the inhumanity — at home, and from above — that threatens to rip their country apart, it also teems with the unyielding sensitivity that viewers have come to expect from McQueen’s work, and for that reason alone it’s a worthwhile addition to the canon of British war films.
As prismatic in its displays of resilience as the entire “Small Axe” cycle was across five different movies, “Blitz” creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.
Grade: B-
“Blitz” screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival. Apple Studios will release it in select theaters on Friday, November 1, and it will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday, November 22.
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