Steve McQueen’s wartime drama explores survival and separation in the shadow of war.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Writer-director Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” tells the story of a 9-year-old, mixed-race boy’s journey across a World War II hellscape and his white mother’s struggle to find him amid the chaos and wholesale death of the bombing and burning of London. Inspired by a photo of a World War II-era Black boy with a suitcase at a train station that McQueen once saw, the film has been deemed too conventional for some tastes. I found it breathtakingly real and terrifyingly nightmarish.
Saoirse Ronan plays Rita Hanway, the young mother who lives in the Stepney Green section of East London with her son George and her father Gerald (Paul Weller). The grandfather, who has a beloved cat named Olly, plays piano at a local pub. His daughter sings and works at a munitions factory making bombs for the war. At some earlier point, she frequents a Black club where she and her lover Marcus dance to hot jazz. A street fight and the unjust arrest of Marcus separate the two lovers before George is born. Georges’ father, who was from Granada, was deported, we learn in flashbacks triggered by the characters’ memories throughout the action. George and Rita are separated when he is evacuated to the countryside. But he rebels, jumps from the train, and resolves to get home, kicking off a journey that is surprising, sometimes lovely, but more often brutal and horrifying.
Making his screen debut as George, Elliott Heffernan is vulnerable, resolute, brave, mostly frightened, and alone. In the course of his travels, he encounters three boys his age, all illegally sharing a railway car, and he is almost killed crossing the tracks. Later, he meets Ife (a marvelous Benjamin Clementine), whose name means “love” in his language. Ife is a Black Air Raid warden. His job is to make rounds during blackout periods and get all the lights shut off. He finds George stranded near the lavish Piccadilly Arcade, gazing into the windows. He takes George, who tells Ife that he is “not Black,” back to Air Raid HQ, feeds him, and finds the boy a place to sleep in the Underground.
The next morning, Georges is kidnapped by a woman also of mixed race who first appears to be kind to him. He falls into the hands of a maniac named Albert (Stephen Graham), this film’s Fagin, the brutish king of the band of boy thieves in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Albert needs George because he is small enough to slip into a bombed jewelry shop and steal its contents for him.
In a harrowing scene, George does just that, but he is almost captured by two wardens who flee when the place threatens to collapse. McQueen, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux (“Little Women”), and production designer Adam Stockhausen (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) deserve tremendous credit for depicting a ravaged, burning London. The film’s opening is a diabolical frenzy of sirens, flames, burning houses, and an unmanned fire hose flailing like a monstrous serpent in the air.
As it was in real life, Londoners are met with locked gates to the Underground when they first try to seek shelter from the bombing. But the authorities relent. Armed with his father’s St. Christopher medal, George tries to accept being evacuated. But after being made fun of by two white boys on the train, whom he later challenges to a fight, he decides to bail and take his first steps on his almost “Pinocchio”-like odyssey. He will not end up in the belly of a whale, exactly. But it’s close.
Rita, meanwhile, has an appointment with the BBC at her factory. To the tune of a live band, she sings the originally composed ditty “Winter’s Coat.” She and her father are also partial to “Ain’t Misbehavin.”’ At an Arcade candy shop, George spies grotesque statues of sugar plantation slaves. “Blitz” is a painful inoculation for the boy, who is scarred and transformed by what happens to him. This includes being ordered by Albert to loot dead bodies in a posh nightclub that took a direct hit.
In supporting roles, Harris Dickinson puts a lot into the small role of Jack, a neighbor and admirer of Rita’s, who is also a firefighter. Hayley Squires (“Great Expectations”) leaves quite an impression, as usual, as Rita’s ribald coworker Tilda. Music by Academy Award-winner Hans Zimmer, whose mother lived through the London Blitz, is more restrained than usual, and that is a very good thing.
‘Blitz’
Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, including some racism, violence, strong language, brief sexuality, and smoking.
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine
Director/Writer: Steve McQueen
Running Time: 2 hours
Where to Watch: Coolidge Corner Movie Theater, Landmark Kendall Square
Grade: A-
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