Blitz
Directed by Steve McQueen (2024)
Review by Tim Finch
The fortitude, solidarity and good humour shown by Londoners in the face of the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the capital in 1940 and 1941 is a hallowed chapter in British wartime history, so it presents a challenge for a British filmmaker setting out to re-envision it. Steve McQueen’s approach to this challenge is to present a largely respectful remake of, rather than a radical retake on, well-worn episodes, while viewing them through fresh eyes – those of a nine-year old, mixed-race boy called George.
George, who escapes back to London after being evacuated, is at the heart of Blitz and first-timer Elliott Heffernan gives such a luminous performance in the role that he achieves the remarkable feat of almost relegating Saoirse Ronan (who is nonetheless excellent playing his mother, Rita) to the status of supporting actor. Otherwise, the cast are not greatly helped by playing definite ‘types’ – whether it be heart-of-gold cockney girls, snooty toffs, or cuff-round-the ear-ole policemen. The casting of two music icons yields mixed results, with Paul Weller rather stiff and unconvincing as George’s grandfather, while Benjamin Clementine is serene and otherworldly as Ife, a guardian angel ARP warden (as far from Bill Pertwee as Warden Hodges in Dad’s Army as it is possible to get!).
Ife and George share the most resonant scene of the film. The boy, who has never met his father (he was deported to Grenada for fighting back against racist thugs outside a night club) is struck by Ife’s blackness, but initially doesn’t embrace his own. However, when Ife tucks him up in a bunk in an air raid shelter, before going back out into the bombing raids, never to return, George says to him ‘I am black’.
Less convincing is Ife’s rallying cry for Britons of all backgrounds to stand united with each other and against Nazism, which implausibly dissolves the racial tension in the shelter when a white couple put up a sheet to divide their sleeping place from that of a Sikh family. Credulity is also stretched when Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham, hamming it up as a couple of Dickensian grotesques, steal the valuables off the still warm (and remarkably intact) corpses of revellers caught in a recreation of the famous raid on the Café de Paris in 1941.
This scene follows a gorgeous evocation of the nightclub, one of the whirling and visceral set-pieces of which McQueen is such a master. Most notable in Blitz are those sequences that brilliantly whip up the sound and fury of fire storms and crashing masonry, and of human and animal terror, or, by contrast, evoke the eery quiet of devastated London streets on the morning after raids. Oddly, though, a scene which looks as if it is going to build into the dramatic highlight of the film, when a London underground station crammed with people floods with water, is cut off just as it is reaching its climax.
The fragmentary nature of Blitz is in part explained by McQueen’s seeming desire to reference and celebrate classic British films. So there’s a joyous steam train scene featuring George and three scallywag brothers that has echoes of The Railway Children (1970). There’s a scene in which a BBC outside broadcast comes from an East End bomb-making factory which recalls the Ealing comedies. There’s the nod in the jewel-thieving scenes to the dark recreations of Dickensian London by David Lean and many other film makers. But none of these scenes are really allowed to breathe and develop, in contrast, most notably, to the celebrated long takes and deep immersions in McQueen’s Small Axe films for the BBC in 2020.
Blitz is much more multiplex than it is arthouse, and it comes with the requisite heart-pumping action and heartwarming emotion. Ultimately, it’s a movie you might enjoy watching again on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but it’s not one that resounds long in the mind.