‘Blitz’ Review: Steve McQueen’s Muddled WWII Drama
Despite an assured visual style, Steve McQueen’s latest fiction film, Blitz, is an often muddled and dull drama that doesn’t know what it wants to say about the central characters it focuses on.
After making an extensive but inconsistent television show (as much as some critics will tell you that they are movies, they’re not) with Small Axe and a great documentary that sadly went unnoticed by many with Occupied City, Steve McQueen returns to the world of fiction filmmaking with Blitz. Its opening scene posits the film as a harrowing World War II drama set during the Blitz when Germans repeatedly bombed the United Kingdom for a sustained period of eight months during the war.
As firefighters scramble to extinguish homes that have been devastated by bombings, one of them gets hit by a loose firehose and dies instantly. It immediately gives the movie a sense of dramatic power that showcases the true horrors of the Blitz without attempting to trivialize or exploit its victims for cheap dramatic points. Well, that sort of thing happens during the movie’s final scene. However, for a while, McQueen and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux frame the bombings with a lens of pure terror, not only for the British but in how he intercuts menacing overhead shots of planes flying on top of the UK with oversaturated black and white images of white daffodils.
This juxtaposition is stark and immediately jolts our attention before McQueen and editor Peter Sciberras cut to our protagonists, mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who sends her son George (Elliott Heffernan) away for safety during the Blitz. Rita does this to protect her son, but George immediately resents her and wants to find his way back home. As a result, he jumps off the train and attempts to return to Stepney, where he will encounter massive peril and challenges on the path to home.
It's basically McQueen’s version of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, though without any of the emotional attachment we had with a young Christian Bale. There are perhaps two or three incredible scenes in Blitz, one of them being the aforementioned firehose kill at the top of the movie. The other is an almost unbroken one-shot of George evading heavy artillery fire as he attempts to find shelter. The last one occurs in a flooded underground station, where the photography claustrophobically follows George trying to flee the deluge.
Credit where credit is due, Le Saux’s cinematography is the major highlight of Blitz. McQueen has always been a gifted visual storyteller, as evidently illustrated in his best-ever movie, Widows, or in his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. Here, the challenge is to depict the horrors of the Blitz through the eyes of a child. In sequences of pure shock, the camera always stays at his level, whether stuck in the middle of a crowd of innocent bystanders who try their hardest to reach safety or when George has to run far, far away from danger, and never look behind him. These scenes would often take my breath away, if only because McQueen knows how to pull us into his story visually.
There’s a shocking scene occurring after George flees from his train and meets another group of youngsters who have done the same. The quartet of kids immediately bond and powerfully scream for freedom as they climb to the top of another moving train. But it doesn’t end well for one of the kids, which profoundly disturbs George (and the audience, who did not expect to see this, with Le Saux’s camera smartly inferring what happened instead of directly showing the aftermath).
That is, until the next scene, which completely forgets this disturbing moment and moves on to another shocking scene. Rinse and repeat until it reaches a ridiculously manipulative finale seen a mile away. It's there that Blitz begins to lose itself in what could’ve been a harrowing yet inspiring journey of a young boy wanting to stay with his mother and will stop at nothing until he’s returned home. And as visually (and sonically) cogent as it is, the character dynamics between George and Rita are haphazardly constructed despite two impassioned performances from both its lead actors. Heffernan, in particular, is revelatory in scenes that require subtle shifts in his demeanor, where he begins to accept himself as Black through his interactions with a soldier named Ife (Benjamin Clementine) after telling him he is not.
Living as a mixed-race child, George has to endure bullying and abuse from other children and adults. As a result, he’s rejected his Black identity, which is exacerbated by never knowing his father, who was deported after attacking a group of racist thugs. But he’s now begun to accept himself as such once Ife reminds everyone that living in a time of war means putting all prejudices aside and helping each other. It’s one of the movie’s few powerful scenes that give us a smidge of development within George’s arc, while the rest of Blitz always films him at a distance and never in a profoundly personal way, despite always filming on his level.
Worse yet, none of the scenes with Ronan’s Rita are meaningful (or compelling) in any way. The film never gives us a single reason to care for these people, who, on the surface, are presented in a way that will develop their arcs (the mother longing for the return of the son after she finds out about his escape and a child maturing further than he will realize). However, they’re instead stuck in cyclical scenes that do them very little favors. George is constantly traumatized and is always caught in the middle of one distressing moment after another, while Rita doesn’t do much until finding out about her son’s disappearance, to which she and her lover Jack (Harris Dickinson, completely wasted) begin to look for him, almost out of necessity, and not out of love and fear.
But these scenes don’t have nearly enough impact because McQueen devotes most of his focus to George, whose misery porn begins to dilute itself when another harrowing moment arrives on top of another harrowing moment, and so on. Blitz marks McQueen’s first film as a solo screenwriter, which could prove challenging when one doesn’t know how to modulate emotions effectively. He certainly has the gift of telling visually enrapturing stories but can never fully invest us by keeping his protagonists distanced as he does here.
One storyline is more socio-politically active than the other, but the commentary seemingly takes a backseat when it’s introduced and gets completely ignored two scenes later. The other is nothing but a series of traumatic experiences that, while compellingly shot and starkly depicted, begin to lose impact. Heffernan has far more material to work with than Ronan. However, their characters still ring hollow and undercooked by the time McQueen wants to pull the heartstrings and manipulate the audience into crying with an ending so obvious it made this critic quite livid.
It's the closest McQueen reached the level of atrociousness of Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, thinking it’s saying something meaningful and profound when it’s actually trivializing the Holocaust for cheap crying points.
McQueen never sensationalizes the Blitz in his movie until its final scene, where he desperately wants the audience to feel something. A conclusion like this isn’t earned because we still don’t know much about the characters despite spending over two hours with them, and it certainly won’t sit well with many audience members who were swayed by Blitz’s visual prowess but became progressively disconnected at the empty violence McQueen stages in his movie. It may be slightly better than Small Axe, but it certainly won’t be remembered as his finest hour.