Drearily Conventional Yet Often Charming, Blitz Chronicles the Early Days of British Civilian Turmoil During WWII
Steve McQueen follows last year’s Amsterdam-focused WWII doc Occupied City with this historical drama about a boy who traverses London to reunite with his mother during the early days of the blitz.
A few months before his adaptation of 12 Years a Slave would win multiple Oscars, British filmmaker Steve McQueen made a scathing condemnation concerning historical dramas in the press. “The second world war lasted five years and there are hundreds and hundreds of films about [it],” he told Sky News in January of 2014. “Slavery lasted 400 years and there are less than 20 [films]. We have to redress that balance and look at that time in history.”
10 years later, McQueen presents Blitz, his own take on this notorious period of British strife and terror. Although the writer-director platforms issues of race, identity and labor in his recount of the early days of German blitzkrieg bombings of residential London neighborhoods, McQueen unfortunately falls into many of the same conventional pitfalls that have plagued the “hundreds and hundreds” of WWII-era films that have preceded his own.
The story centers on 9-year-old George (wonderful newcomer Elliott Heffernan), whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) has made the difficult decision to evacuate the child from their cozy home in Stepney Green. Uttering solemn goodbyes to grandad Gerald (Paul Weller) and rotund pet tabby cat Ollie (adorably captured by feline duo Zinger and Tinkerbell), George is escorted to the train station by his mother, who falls to pieces when her child spews a hurtful remark before boarding. Immediately feeling remorse for his insolence, George decides to jump overboard only an hour into his journey, rolling down a grassy hill with his suitcase before dusting himself off and embarking in the general direction of home. Luckily, his mother gifted him a Saint Christopher medallion right before he left, a cliched memento that will certainly “protect” the child as he faces increasingly treacherous obstacles.
The young boy’s odyssey is rife with connections, which weave a tapestry of the varied responses residents had to conflict reaching their soil. First, he encounters three young brothers who, like him, hopped aboard a moving London-bound freight train in order to dodge evacuating to the countryside. George then bonds with Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian-born British soldier who provides a vital Black perspective to the mixed-race child, whose father was deported back to Grenada before he was born. Unfortunately, he also gets caught up in a tribe of opportunistic Cockney bandits who sift through rubble—and desecrate dead bodies—in order to acquire abandoned worldly spoils. Yet none of these interactions prove lasting for George; indeed, anyone who crosses his path winds up dead, mangled or helplessly adrift. Blitz might be a story of a war-torn metropolis and its inhabitants, but even so it feels bogged down by its ever-mounting tragedies.