Blitz Is the Worst Movie Steve McQueen Has Made
There’s no such thing as a typical Steve McQueen movie. Ever since he started making features with his 2008 Irish hunger-strike drama Hunger, the artist and filmmaker’s work for the screen has demonstrated an intriguing restlessness, an unwillingness to be pinned down in terms of subject matter or structure. You can tease out something like a guiding philosophy in McQueen’s interest in taking vast struggles, ones between nations or being waged against minority groups, and making them felt on an intimate and sensorial level. But even that’s more a tendency than the unifying quality for a director who went from a chilly portrait of a sex addict in Shame to a devastating depicting of slavery in 12 Years a Slave, and from there to the sinewy heist movie Widows and then to Small Axe, a kaleidoscopic anthology series about London’s West Indian community.
McQueen’s most recent films are both about World War II, and they still couldn’t be more different. Occupied City, the documentary he directed last year, was a work of formal vigor and a marathon run time, juxtaposing mundane footage of present-day Amsterdam with a history of what happened in each location during the Nazi occupation over four and a half hours. Blitz, his latest, is a sentimental journey through London in 1940, following a boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) as he runs away from the train transporting him and other children evacuated to the countryside and heads back to the ravaged city to reunite with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan, giving her all in an odd role that leans on her supporting character more than is warranted).
It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station. There’s a sturdy dose of the Dickensian to its episodic adventures, never more explicitly than the interlude in which George ends up in the clutches of a gang of thieves, led by an unstable Stephen Graham, who needs someone of slight stature to break into bombed-out sites to steal the goods left behind.
But Blitz doesn’t have the narrative propulsion of Dickens, skipping its young protagonist from perilous situation to perilous situation. It’s through George that we see a London struggling to keep its tattered social fabric intact through the terror of nightly hell rained from above by German aircraft that are like glimpses of monstrous creatures in the spotlights — but the film doesn’t trust itself to his perspective, undercutting its own frantic momentum by checking in on Rita as she goes to her job at a munitions factory, fails to enjoy a childless night out at a pub, spends some time in the company of the neighbor (Harris Dickinson) who’s clearly in love with her, volunteers at a shelter, and is finally told that her son has gone missing.
Like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, Blitz doesn’t feel like it’s taking place from the perspective of a child so much as it does an adult who’s stooping to a child’s level and struggling to maintain the position. The prescriptive nature of its aims intrudes on its ability to fully immerse itself in its main character as he gets exposed to the ugliness and the generosity humanity is capable of. Not that he’s unfamiliar with the former — George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), is a Grenadian immigrant who was deported before George was born after being blamed for an attack by some racists. George has grown up enduring slurs from adults and fellow kids, experiences that clearly feed his trepidation in boarding a train to the unknown and encountering some of the same attitudes from fellow passengers.
In centering Blitz on a mixed-race child thrown alone into the chaos of a war-torn country, McQueen aims to both poke holes in propagandistic representations of this period as one of uniform “keep calm and carry on” solidarity and expand the image of a patriotic British identity to include kindly Nigerian ARP wardens, devoted Jewish community leaders, and, eventually, George himself as the unexpected hero of a hair-raising disaster involving an underground station. Blitz’s desire to rewrite sepia-toned historical mythology into something more expansive and less comforting is noble, but it also leads the film more than it should.
Blitz is more conventional than McQueen’s previous work, which wouldn’t be a problem if McQueen fully embraced that fact. Instead, his film is filled with cul-de-sacs and digressions that imply that he himself is impatient with the primary story he’s chosen to tell. Blitz has half a step in the realm of the musical, with a glitzy nightclub scene, a jazz-bar sequence that brings to mind the dance-floor shots in Lovers Rock, and Ronan performing a song for the radio in front of her co-workers. As exuberant as these moments are, they also play like intrusions into a main narrative that already insists on flinging its tender-aged lead from traumatic situation to traumatic situation until it all borders on absurdism, as though George is starring in his own two-decades-later urban version of 1917 without the benefit of the single-shot contrivance. Blitz has to rely on other plot machinations to keep itself going instead, and to keep its protagonist in the city but unable to make his way home. If it were able to trust its naïve hero to carry the film along in its lulls as well as its set pieces, these might have felt less awkward. Instead, Blitz leaves you thinking not about the horrors of war and how they get sealed into the collective memory but about how you should always listen to your mother.