They just gave Richard Curtis an honorary Oscar last weekend, and if he had directed Blitz, it would be the best movie that he ever made. But he didn’t make Blitz, Steve McQueen did, and there lies the thin line between accomplishment and disappointment. Ever since his debut feature, Hunger, in 2008, McQueen has expertly set audience expectations – we know what we’re in for with A Steve McQueen Movie. We anticipate a formal cinematic rigor, an intellectual tenacity and fearlessness, as well as a fierce narrative precision. It’s not that all of this is particularly missing from Blitz, but it’s much less insistent. It’s the most anonymously made movie of McQueen’s career.
I remember fearing this might happen in 2018, when he released the 2018 crime thriller Widows. I thought that McQueen making a more mainstream genre piece meant he was stepping away from his arthouse roots. Well, Widows was a brilliantly calibrated mix of movie stars and uncomfortable themes, the perfect example of a “serious director” making a movie for the masses. That the movie flopped feels like a travesty for everyone, but it showed that McQueen has at least some aspiration for mass appeal. Blitz is even more broadly produced, but the calibration is off. It’s main perspective is that of a child, and there is a hint that he may have made this movie with a child audience in mind, perhaps the first of many mistakes the McQueen made.
Elliot Heffernan plays George, a young boy in 1940 London. We’re a year into the war and Germany has chosen the path of constant and frequent bombing of England, which leaves all its citizens in a constant state of panic and fear. George’s mother, Rita (Soairse Ronan), works in a factory preparing shells for the RAF. His father is a Grenadian whom he’s never met, deported by forces who opposed his inter-race relationship with Rita. This makes George – both a bastard and black – the subject of much ridicule and prejudice amongst his age group. Rita does her best to light up his life, but George already has a sour view of the world at a very young age.
When Rita decides to evacuate George to the country, far away from the threat of German bombs, George’s mood turns further taciturn. Before boarding the train, he tells Rita he hates her and sprints away, forbidding his mother a chance of a proper goodbye. The moment stings for both. For Rita, her guilt, already heavy, increases ten fold. For George, it sparks instant regret. So much so that, not far into his trip he decides to leap from the train and find his way back to London in order to be with her. Or at least that’s my interpretation. One of the biggest issues with Blitz is that it’s almost impossible to explain any of George’s decisions. Even within the context of him being a child, the logic both for his character, and the story at large, never connects.
What follows is an Odyssean journey through bombed out London on a quest to find Rita. He encounters some nice people, like a warm-hearted officer name Ife (Benjamin Clementine), who may be the first positive black male role model George has ever met. When Ife stands up against obvious racial bigotry, it’s a bolt of energy the likes George has never felt. He later comes across a disturbed jewel thief named Albert (Stephen Graham), who leads a mischievous crew taking advantage of the carnage, stealing dead people’s belongings. George proves useful since his small stature means he can squeeze into spaces that Albert cannot. Meanwhile, we watch a parallel story of Rita working in the factory and joining a grassroots movement to provide underground shelter to the population.
Eventually Rita learns that George never arrived at his destination and she recruits the help of the soft-spoken police officer Jack (Harris Dickinson), to help find him. If you’re someone who’s watched a movie before, you would expect this to be the time that Blitz kicks into high gear, recognizing the stakes and applying them accordingly. McQueen is immediately resistant to that. Rita’s search for George is concurrent with her volunteer work at an underground refuge, and everyone seems content with the idea that George is a “scrapper” who will come out okay. She never even attempts to leave London. It’s an astonishingly cavalier way to approach a young boy lost in a city facing a cascade of bombs, but its fitting within McQueen’s almost hostile approach to the movie’s tone, refusing to give in to audience expectation.
Blitz does make some rather interesting choices. Most of them revolve around undoing the mythology of Londoner nobility in the face of the German Blitzkrieg. Our pristine historical image of Britain’s unflinching courage is picked apart by McQueen who exposes his home country as a land rife with racism hypocritically denouncing Hitler’s fascism. And Ronan, as Rita, gives us a performance that is touching, even singing us a song. The unfortunate truth is that the least interesting part of the movie is the main through-line of George’s journey back home. McQueen never directs it with any kind of urgency, which makes the film slack, and his direction of Heffernan leads one to believe that he has no idea what he expected from his young performer. Anecdotally, if anyone can figure out why Harris Dickinson is even in this movie, I’d like to know.
McQueen is a self-reflexive filmmaker. His films commenting on themselves as they unfold is part of what makes his best films so exhilarating. Even 12 Years a Slave – a Best Picture winner that many have turned against – forced audiences to consider the realities of slavery unlike any American film before or since. In his Small Axe films, the visceral reaction is the point. He pays special attention to the details of the body and how it reacts to grave injustice, racial prejudice, or any other form of blunt emotional trauma. This technique has made him one of the most fascinating directors of the last twenty years, but it is perhaps the exact wrong approach to Blitz, which seeks to fit its mainstream plot into his experimental design. It ends up failing both disciplines, and results in his least impressive film by far.
Written and Directed by Steve McQueen