“Blitz”
A different take on Britain under bombardment.
Blitz, the latest effort from director Steve McQueen, is “pretty good,” meaning above-average yet less than a full-fledged “good” film. Two years ago, a movie — Railway Children — hit theaters with roughly similar subject matter: how London sought to save its children during the Nazi bombing blitz of 1940 by allowing their parents to send them into the countryside via train. That film proved “decent” or “mediocre” — utterly forgettable from a narrative or emotional perspective, but offering some impressive imagery and attractive visual sequencing.
Blitz is essentially a twist on this historical subject matter. The editing and cinematography are both commendable: McQueen delivers many a fine composition and lights the film in a nuanced manner. Saorise Ronan’s performance, in a pretty standard role as the child’s mother, is not one of her most memorable or distinctive (she proved better in a much more complex part in The Outrun, from earlier this fall), but Elliott Heffernan shines as her biracial son. Heffernan, who turned eleven this month and made his screen debut in Blitz, comes across as a real, introverted, instinctive child, not as a “child actor” delivering a “performance.” Indeed, I quite agree with Variety’s Janelle Riley here:
It worked; the young actor is earning raves for his turn in the Steve McQueen epic, playing George, the mixed-race son of Saorise Ronan’s single mother Rita. As WWII rages on and London endures an aerial bombardment, Rita makes the agonizing decision to send George away to safety in the country, despite his pleas. … The film hinges upon his lead performance and it helps that Heffernan is almost impossibly adorable and compulsively watchable onscreen. But this is no Disneyfied child star turn — it’s a complex, deeply emotional performance that actors five times his age would struggle to deliver.
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The movie’s main flaw is that the story’s tone is just not raw enough for its subject matter. Although the tension and grittiness improve some in the second half, Blitz required more of an edgy, realistic (or neo-realistic) quality. After all, we are talking about frightening uncertainty under brutal wartime circumstances, and the film’s tone should have reflected this knife’s-edge situation. The result could have been something outstanding, along the lines of the “very good,” Oscar-nominated Lion from 2016, also a movie about a child separated from his mother and forced to survive amidst wrenching trauma and manipulative, predatory adults. Instead, McQueen opts for a softer touch in Blitz, perhaps to render the film more palatable for kids in the audience. Such a desire is admirable enough, but it fails to make for a memorable movie.
Conversely, the movie’s main strength is its social complexity and commentary amidst a typical World War II milieu. The tendency with this type of narrative is simply to emphasize the resilience and unity of the English people during this “darkest hour” of their history. And, to be sure, we witness plenty of that resilience and some degree of unity. But we also see plenty of bigotries and social divisions, including class resentment that borders on the macabre, and the kind of profiteering off devastation that is virtually endemic to warfare.
And in that vein, Blitz offers a useful corrective to a recent cinematic trend. Many period pieces set in Europe from recent years, including such movies as Wicked Little Letters and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare from earlier in 2024, have featured actors and actresses of color in fictional roles that have traditionally been played by white performers or historical parts where the actual individuals were white. Naturally, this trend reflects a respectable desire by today’s filmmakers to embrace diversity and equal opportunity, to no longer keep certain parts from minorities and to instead cast the best person for the role, regardless of skin color. But this (apparently) admirable motivation is actually a double-edged sword, because it creates the impression that European societies from generations ago, or centuries ago, proved colorblind and egalitarian, when in actuality these countries gave us the transatlantic slave trade and global colonization. To use a hyperbolic example, it would be like casting, say, Denzel Washington as Thomas Jefferson in an American period piece. Yes, such a decision would create an opportunity for a minority actor that did not traditionally exist, but from the perspective of historical representation and impressions, it would be both distracting and potentially dangerous, a way — intentionally or not — to whitewash racism in US history and create a skewed alternate reality with no historical credibility or realism whatsoever. And even though feature period pieces are obviously not documentaries, they do require a sufficient sense of historical authenticity in order to prove fully credible as movies. Yet somehow, this trend has become acceptable for period pieces set in Europe. At best, the result is a modest distraction that arguably keeps a given film — even a good one — from attaining greater potential. At worst, the result is an Alice-in-Wonderland historical delusion.
McQueen, as a Black Englishman, does not play that game. In Blitz, he shows a society that is far from colorblind, that is divided in its ostensible unity, and that is not entirely admirable amidst its resilience. Without being preachy, McQueen captures the specter of British colonialism, injustice, dehumanization, and racialized violence. Even as Londoners resist the Nazis, they are not without their own poisonous social baggage.
In summation, Blitz is an ironic mixed bag of a movie: overly generic from a visceral perspective, but refreshingly not generic from an intellectual and social one. The technical quality of the cinematography and editing elevate the film above this muddled mediocrity, yet only to a certain extent.
