Blitz, Steve McQueen’s story of World War II London is a functional drama illustrating the different ‘Londons’ suffering under the terrifying blitzkrieg bombing by the Luftwaffe. Blitz is not the level of filmmaking audiences have come to expect from Steve McQueen and although it is not a mediocre film, it tends to be rote and formulaic with glimpses of a great film struggling to surface. However, when the great film does shine through, Blitz proves itself devastating in scale.
The audience is plunged into the melee as the East End is dealing with the bombing and immediate aftermath of a night raid. Hans Zimmer’s metallic score intersects with Yorick Le Saux’s dizzying camerawork surveying a metropolis in ruins. A firefighter is knocked unconscious by his own hose. A clock tower half stands. It seems the Thames itself is burning. The bombs rain down, aircraft shadows hover over water. McQueen interrupts the scene with static and black and white footage of a field of flowers, then moves the drama a week or so in the past where Gerald (Paul Weller) is playing piano in his Stepney terrace with his grandson George (Elliott Heffernan) and daughter Rita (Saoirse Ronan) moving around the warmly hued home.
The bombings are coming closer to the East End and the shelters are full. The air raid sirens go off and there is nowhere for the people to go except to push in to the tube stations. Rita works in a munitions factory by day and cannot be always present to care for her nine-year-old son. Gerald suggests that it is time for her to evacuate George out of London; something she finds heart wrenching. Eventually deciding that the danger to her son’s life outweighs her maternal need to keep him close she takes him to the trains heading for the relative safety of the countryside. George is furious at the separation and tells her he hates her as the train pulls away.
As a mixed-race child, George is subjected to cruelty from the other children on the train which makes him wonder how he will be treated by their rural counterparts. He decides he is going to return to London. Jumping off the moving train, George begins an exhausting and harrowing odyssey making his way back to the East End.
Meanwhile, Rita is preparing to sing for the BBC as part of their Homefront coverage to boost the flagging spirits of Londoners. Her pompous supervisor Clive (Joshua McGuire) enjoys reminding the working-class women of the factory that he is their superior not only by dent of gender, but also education. Something the rebellious Tilda (an always welcome Hayley Squires) and Doris (Erin Kellyman) throw back in his face. There is no time for the women in the factory to be mothers or daughters – they are cogs in the war machine but treated as if they are a ‘necessary evil’.
Rita finds out that George has not arrived at his billeting destination and is ‘lost’ (Ronan firing on all cylinders hitting out at the Operation Pied Piper officials). Rita had already been forcibly separated from George’s father before the child was born as he was targeted by racists after a night of dancing, then arrested and presumably deported back to Grenada. Along with the silently lovestruck fireman Jack (Harris Dickinson) Rita frantically searches for George, but with the nightly bombings and curfews in place her quest to find one small boy in a sea of desperate people seems hopeless. She spends her evenings volunteering in the Spitalfields shelter run by Mickey Davies (Leigh Gill playing a real-life hero of the Blitz). Gerald, like so many, simply stops going to shelters and takes his chances at home.
Resourceful and strong willed, George makes it back to London but finds himself in Piccadilly which could almost be seen as another country to the East End. He’s utterly lost and finds himself wandering the Empire Arcade where he sees images of colonised countries providing English products for the English. Exaggerated images of the ‘savage’ Black worker smiling as he carries produce for the ‘True Britons’ reminds him of how easily he is reduced to ‘monkey’ by people on the streets. It is a pertinent reminder of how British national identity was (and is) inextricably linked to resource and land theft. George is found by a voluntary MP (military police) officer, Ife (Benjamin Clementine) who came to England from Nigeria. Ife’s kindness, bravery, and grace make George feel he can, perhaps for the first time, claim himself as Black.
George’s ‘adventures’ across London become Dickensian as he gets pulled into a gang of looters run by Stephen Graham’s unhinged Arthur and his grotesque mother Beryl (Kathy Burke). Being small George can climb into damaged buildings and take whatever goods the gang requires. McQueen swings back in time slightly to a West End nightclub and restaurant where the revellers are being entertained by a group of Black musicians before a bomb falls and the pressure suffocates the patrons. Death becomes the great equaliser as Arthur and Beryl salivate over the ‘toffs’ with their expensive jewels. The ruined splendour of the nightclub becomes ghastlier as McQueen had shown the audience these people alive. Now they are entombed, and their bodies are being ‘grave robbed’ without a grave.
Steve McQueen’s Blitz is spectacular but overcrowded. Chaos and confusion amongst a ‘cast of thousands’ is not unusual in a war epic, and Blitz is a large-scale production. McQueen’s narrative ambitions and his screenwriting don’t always match with the visual and technical power of the work. McQueen’s message within the film is that even at home the Kingdom was not united; something he has a character explain in an impassioned speech. That manner of handholding the audience through what they are seeing in action is superfluous.
Class, race, gender, and the impact of colonisation in Britain historically (and contemporarily) create a skewered nationalism. Outside McQueen’s frame hover Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and Edward VIII’s pro Hitler tendencies. Inside the frame are the protests to open the underground stations as shelters because the people of the East End were without anywhere to go. White Londoners refusing to be placed next to Asian or Jewish families. Women standing up as united workers. The BBC reporting only what it saw as ‘morale building.’ People pushing for better conditions in the shelters being labelled communists.
Rita and George act as the connective threads in McQueen’s sprawling event. Newcomer Elliott Heffernan is effectively the point-of-view character, and he fulfils that role with remarkable maturity and vulnerability. Saoirse Ronan is wonderful as the young single mother whose love for her child is unwavering. Benjamin Clémentine’s Ife, although occasionally saddled with cliché laden dialogue, manages to steadily command every scene he is in. Unfortunately, Harris Dickinson is mostly wasted as Jack and Paul Weller is so often stuck playing the piano that as Gerald his impact is lessened because he seems cast because he is Paul Weller – famous left-wing working-class musician.
Blitz is not Steve McQueen’s best work. It’s a conventional war piece about a period of London and British history that is not lacking in fictional representation. Yet even a minor Steve McQueen work has jolts of genius and arresting and indelible parts despite the whole not cohering. When the tremendous sections of Blitz where destructive spectacle, human spirit, and the stress of war weighing more heavily on the shoulders of the already dispossessed come together, McQueen’s directorial virtuosity is unquestionable.
Editor: Peter Sciberras
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