Blitz

Released 2024. Director: Steve McQueen

THE YEAR IS 1940 AND LONDONERS are living in constant vigilance. Moments of normalcy can be punctuated without notice by the blare of piercing air raid sirens warning of impending bombing by the Germans. Everyone rushes out of their homes, clutching their children and a suitcase hoping to get into an underground bunker before getting caught in explosions and under crumbling buildings.

Against this backdrop, Steve McQueen’s staging of World War II directs our attention from the wider view of the war to a story between a boy and his mother. Nine-year-old George lives with his mother and maternal grandfather and has never known his father because the man was taken away by racist police in a scuffle simply for the fact he was black. George’s mother, Rita, as played by the porcelain-complexioned and blond Saoirse Ronan, couldn’t be any whiter. George has always known he’s different from the other kids and McQueen makes the audience see the war through the eyes of this bi-racial child.

After a near miss in yet another night of bombing, Rita, like many other parents, evacuates George with other children on a train to the country as advised by the government. George, however, sulking from the separation, jumps off the train partway on the journey. From here the movie is divided into two concurrent strands, one about George’s journey home, the other about Rita, and concludes when the two are reunited.

Rita works at a munitions factory assembling bombs. She doesn’t involve herself with the politically minded women in the factory who protest against the war but keeps her head low. George’s story is the more interesting of the two. The boy’s attempts to return home takes him through parts of the country and city he’s not familiar with and through his encounters with strangers, McQueen paints a picture of the reality for a person of colour in England at the time.

Wandering the streets at night, George is found by a kind air raid warden who takes him to a shelter. There he sees how even at a time of national crisis, prejudice and xenophobia overtake compassion and decency between people of different skin colours. Further along his way home, George is lured with the promise of food and exploited by looters to ransack bombed-out jewellery shops and steal from corpses.

Come to think of it, it’s not entirely accurate to describe Blitz as a view of World War II in Britain through the eyes of a child. George is too young to understand why the war is happening. The meaning of war for the boy is what he experiences to people like him. McQueen’s intention is to depict the stain in the social fabric when George’s eyes are open not just to the perils of war, but more so to those that arise from his fellow countrymen and women. While the Germans conduct air raids on his country, the threats to some people’s survival also include bigotry and profiteering from their neighbours.

McQueen is an accomplished director with a keen insight on human suffering, as we have seen in films such as Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave. Despite its theme, Blitz may just be the most lightweight film he’s done by far. The issue I feel lies with the vignette nature of the narrative. Each of George’s experiences reveals a facet of the story and while they are all meaningfully delivered and artistically presented, the sum is less than the parts. Each incident is sketched in broad strokes before moving on to the next and so the movie in its entirety is lacking a deeper inspection both emotionally and thematically.

Elliott Heffernan, in his first acting role, proves to be a capable child actor, though the trajectory of George’s arc doesn’t quite give his character a dramatic coming-of-age moment that’d have shown how his journey has changed him (much like young Christian Bale’s character in Empire of the Sun, also about a boy separated from his family at war time).

For an actress like Saoirse Ronan who has proven she can navigate complicated emotions with poise and grace, Rita is an under-developed role who doesn’t quite engage our sympathy even when the single mother has just lost her young son. The supporting cast including Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke are not given material to make a stronger impression due to their limited time on screen. Harris Dickinson’s character, who appears to have feelings for Rita, barely registers.

Blitz outlines moments of social outrage and the director’s passion for the subject matter is obvious. The way the story is presented, however, results in tokenism and an absence of nuance.

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