In England, every director of eligible age faces being conscripted into making a movie about the British experience of a world war of their choosing. This film must be action-packed yet sentimental. It must be tastefully shot and scored. It must not be outrightly conservative — and in fact should oppose the most glaring prejudices of the era — but nor should it be so revisionist as to contradict dominant myths about wartime resilience. Failure to comply results in immediate excommunication from the British Film Institute. Rumors swirl concerning blacklists, kidnapped loved ones, and even harsher coercive measures for those who decline.
At least, this is what one has to assume to be the case. For while it’s easy to believe that Joe Wright, Christopher Nolan, Mike Newell, and Sam Mendes might have made such movies of their own accord, only the conscription thesis would explain why Steve McQueen, one of the best British directors of his generation, coming off the back of three idiosyncratic and personal works that marked a return to his artist filmmaker roots — Sunshine State, Grenfell, and Occupied City — would make this totally competent and extremely conventional film about the Home Front.
Blitz, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, takes place during the titular nine-month bombing campaign of 1940-41. The story centers on George (first-time actor Elliott Heffernan), a resourceful biracial boy reluctantly evacuated from the capital by his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan). After a bitter farewell, George, consumed by anger and guilt, leaps from the moving train taking him to rural safety and makes his way home. Back in London, he must navigate the most hostile of environments: both a city in flames and the pervasive racism of wartime Britain.
The film is punctuated by immense sequences that McQueen and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux wring for all their visceral, elemental force. In the opening scene, firemen struggling to quell a blaze; they lose grip of the hosepipe, which thrashes around like some monstrous eel attempting to evade their capture. Later, George must escape a flooding underground station. Such nightmarish spectacle makes for the film’s most effective and affecting moments. (As someone who lives a walkable distance from Stepney Green, where much of the film’s action takes place, I found it hard not to be disturbed watching my hometown blown to bits.) For anyone with a heart, it will be difficult to watch George’s perilous existence and not think about daily reports from Gaza about children living in the knowledge they could be killed at any moment by Israeli airstrikes.
Despite this grim timeliness, Blitz lacks the critical edge one might expect from McQueen. Londoners may remember an exhibit at the Imperial War Museum which simulated the “Blitz Experience”; was this film a covert adaptation? It certainly shares with Mendes’ 1917 a faith in the powers of cinema to wholly immerse us in the chaos of war, though the film’s smaller moments of beauty and joy — some in flashback, one in a particularly saccharine dream sequence — have a strange tendency to subdue rather than complement the urgency of the action sequences. Music plays a central role in these respites: an intimate singalong to “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at the piano, with Paul Weller doing a good job at playing grandad; a riotous dance sequence in the Café de Paris. But none hit the musical highs of McQueen’s Lovers Rock.
Actually, there’s a case to be made that the emotional auteur of much of Blitz is one Hans Zimmer. His score is as we’ve come to expect: various snippets of pastiche work — Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the munitions factory, Reich’s Different Trains for, well, the trains — alongside the blockbuster bombast that is, for better or worse, wholly his own. Here, screeching Shepard-tone strings, previously deployed to great effect in Nolan’s Dunkirk, take on the character of air raid sirens. There’s no doubting it ramps up the tension, though it’s also hard not to feel that, especially coming off the back of McQueen’s collaborations with Mica Levi and Oliver Coates, it’s all a bit safe. And, as is often the case with Zimmer, way too big.
McQueen’s conventional approach seems at odds with his strength as a filmmaker, which has always been about sneaking daring formal conceits into material with commercial appeal. So many of these utilize duration: the conversation between Bobby Sands and Father Moran and about the morality of a hunger strike, captured in an unbroken 17-minute two shot; the punishingly long takes of Solomon Northup trying to stay balanced on his toes as he hangs from a tree; political hopeful Jack Mulligan arguing with a campaign aide as the Chicago scenery we drive by tells the true story of the city’s economic disparity. Blitz, to be fair, utilities the odd bit of abstraction: the geometrical shapes that dance on the water as the Luftwaffe fly overhead, for instance. But here McQueen prizes the aesthetic over the political, rather than synthesizing the two as before.
The film’s politics, where they do emerge, are curiously simple. There are rousing speeches from shelter marshall Mickey (Leigh Gill) and kindly air-raid warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine), the latter about treating each other with compassion and respect, regardless of ethnicity — Britain is not Hitler’s Germany, he insists. But these moments of righteousness are brief catharses that seem doomed to flatter rather than challenge modern sensibilities. The racism George experiences is what sets McQueen’s film apart from other wartime fare, which so often whitewashes Britain’s past; but one wishes it had gone further in probing the contradictions of a country that could fight fascism abroad while turning a blind eye to the worst prejudices at home. Instead, McQueen is happy to exalt his various angels — Rita, Ife, Mickey, and fireman Jack, who is played by Harris Dickinson, the actor given bafflingly little to do — and tut-tut at outspokenly bigoted villains. And this is all before we get to actual devils, in the form of a Dickensian clique of cartoonish thieves headed by Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham.
The so-called “blitz spirit,” the sense of the sacrifice and togetherness experienced during the bombing, looms large in British cultural memory — so large, in fact, as to constitute a cornerstone of national identity. This was the spirit conjured again and again during years of Tory austerity policies, and again in their pandemic response; “we’re all in this together,” quipped David Cameron. Never mind that the working classes, in both the 1940s and 2010s, suffered significantly more. (The new Labour government will likely avoid invoking the blitz spirit directly, but their quiet return to austerity signals that the rhetoric of sacrifice is far from depleted.) McQueen does, to his credit, push against the myth of the wartime spirit as a great social equalizer; Blitz is a far cry from Wright’s Darkest Hour, in which Churchill converses with citizens on the London Underground. Prejudices remained, McQueen reminds us; the privileged lived very different lives to the rest. Ordinary people often did not Keep Calm and Carry On — they panicked, they broke down, some turned to looting.
But if we know one thing about political myths, it’s how adaptable they are, how resilient. Only the most loathsome reactionaries would take any issue with Blitz’ tentative correction to the historical record, making the film’s tendency toward the palatable — its traditional packaging, its sentimentality — feel like compromise rather than true subversion. If this seems a bit harsh for what is a perfectly entertaining crowd-pleaser, it’s because we’ve come to expect so much more from McQueen. Instead, Blitz is a film that plays with fire, but never quite scorches.
DIRECTOR: Steve McQueen; CAST: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Leigh Gill, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple Original Films; IN THEATERS: November 1; STREAMING: November 22; RUNTIME: 2 hr.
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