“Blitz” Uses Classical Storytelling to Advance a Radical Vision of War - The New Yorker

Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform. Rita, distraught, tries in vain to say a proper goodbye, knowing that they might never see each other again. It’s 1940, German bombs are falling across the city, and George is being evacuated to the countryside, as millions of English children will be in the course of the war. His bitter resentment at this upheaval is startling, even in the annals of Second World War cinema, where fraught farewells in crowded train stations abound.

You may recall another boy telling his mother “I hate you” on a railway platform, though with a mitigating tenderness in his voice. So began “Au Revoir les Enfants” (1987), Louis Malle’s sobering account of his coming of age in Nazi-occupied France. For “Hope and Glory” (1987), the director John Boorman drew on intimate memories of a Blitz-ravaged childhood, with improbably buoyant results; the mother in that film pulled her children back from the train, unable to let them go. But Steve McQueen, the writer and director of “Blitz,” is not making a memoir. He was born more than two decades after V-E Day and raised in London’s burgeoning West Indian community—the rich inspiration for his five-part film anthology, “Small Axe” (2020). While researching that project, McQueen discovered a wartime photograph of a young Black boy with an oversized suitcase. Who was this child, and what became of him? “Blitz” imagines an answer.

Its conclusions, though daubed with Dickensian whimsy and child’s-eye uplift, are remarkably tough and unyielding. George rages at Rita for the same reason that, an hour into his journey, he leaps from the train and hightails it back to London: for a child of a white mother and a Black father, reared in intolerant times, a prolonged family separation would itself be intolerable. For nine years, Rita and her father, Gerald (Paul Weller, quietly magnetic), have been George’s lone bulwark against a city’s cruelty. He has never met his father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), a Grenadian immigrant who was deported, years earlier, for the crime of defending himself against two loutish white men. George has encountered the same bigotry; in a flashback, a neighborhood kid calls him a “Black bastard,” and the pain that springs into George’s eyes makes sense of his every subsequent flinch, frown, and outburst. Heffernan, a gravely captivating newcomer, wraps each expression and gesture around a hard little nubbin of distrust.

A surfeit of flashbacks can topple a narrative, but “Blitz” bends time sparingly, and with great purpose, in a story that surges forward with multipronged urgency. It has much ground to cover, and much devastation to show. The terror of the nightly German assault comes at us in dark, disorienting aerial bursts: bombs fall in what feels like slow motion; ripples of movement coalesce into Luftwaffe planes, reflected on the Thames. At one point, McQueen cuts to a staggering overhead view of the city, a smoking and hauntingly silent ruin in Adam Stockhausen’s intricate production design. Most of the tale, however, unfolds at ground level, and in astoundingly intimate detail. The opening images plunge us into a roaring conflagration, but Yorick Le Saux’s camera is mesmerized not by burning buildings but by a rogue fire hose, whose high-pressure spray nearly defeats the workers trying to wrest it under control. The image tells McQueen’s story: here is a nation, and a defense effort, divided against itself.

George’s mother nonetheless toils in noble service of that effort. By day, she labors in a munitions factory—Rita the Riveter, resplendent in denim. By night, she and her girlfriends knock back drinks in a bustling pub, trying to keep calm and revel on. She also volunteers at an air-raid shelter run by a real-life hero of the Blitz, the organizer Mickey Davies (Leigh Gill), and she shares his activist spirit. In one of the film’s loveliest moments, she croons a tender ditty on the factory floor for a BBC program—a scrap of melodious cheer to chase away a nation’s gloom. Once the song ends, though, so does any gauzy sentimentalization of working-class women. Rita and her sisters-in-arms, presented with a radio microphone, put it to defiant good use. This is McQueen’s method: a passage of lyrical beauty, a chaser of righteous struggle. You cannot survive a war, he suggests, without both.

For those of us who first saw Ronan as Briony, the impulsive teen-age antiheroine of “Atonement” (2007), “Blitz” can feel like a spookily full-circle experience. A slightly older, wiser Briony was played by Romola Garai, but it is hard not to picture the grownup Ronan in her place, stepping determinedly through the London rubble. (Here, too, as in “Atonement,” walls of water surge through a Tube station, turning a refuge into a death trap.) In “Lady Bird” (2017) and “Little Women” (2019), Ronan incarnated the fiery stubbornness of youth; now she stokes her natural warmth into the consuming blaze of a mother’s love. When Rita learns that George is lost in London, she sets out to find him, aided by a police officer, Jack (Harris Dickinson), who quietly loves her. He remains a fuzzily benevolent presence, and any hint of romance is snuffed out too soon; whether this is a casualty of war, or merely of a screenwriter’s haste, remains unclear.

It is George’s perspective, not Rita’s, that dominates “Blitz” and troubles it most deeply. Over a few hellish days and nights, the boy is hurled from one misfortune to the next, none ghastlier than an encounter with two leering Fagins (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke), who are not just thugs but profiteers. They force the boy to rob bombed-out shops and, horrifically, dead bodies. If their malevolence threatens to throw the story off balance, it has a moral counterweight in Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a kindly blackout warden who meets George during his rounds. When racial tensions suddenly ignite among Londoners in close quarters, it falls to Ife, a Nigerian immigrant, to chasten the citizenry: bigotry is Hitler’s evil, he reminds them, not theirs.

That’s a flattering message, and not exactly subtle in its appeal to our better angels. Yet some of us in the audience, disgusted by the persistence of Nazism and anti-immigrant invective in the present, may well appreciate the force of McQueen’s rhetoric. There is nothing tactful, after all, about the prejudices that assault George on every corner. Watch as the camera follows him one night, toward a storefront window display larded with grotesque African caricatures. The next morning, he will be rudely shooed away from another shop by a proprietor, who would doubtless treat a white child differently. There is, in short, another war raging in this movie, and it exacts its grimmest damage not from above but from within. The Blitz doesn’t just plunge London into chaos; it reveals and exacerbates the chaos that has been seething there all along.

This is a bracing, even novel, perspective on a war whose film depictions so often traffic in sententious Greatest Generation platitudes. But that hasn’t kept “Blitz” from being dismissed in some critical quarters as “conventional”—and it is, I suppose, next to McQueen’s previous work, the monumental documentary “Occupied City” (2023), which used extreme formal limitations (a methodical recitation of past atrocities, layered over present-day footage) to convey the immense scale of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. “Blitz” offers a swifter, more accessible vision of a city under siege, but it is guided by the same impulse: to give definition to horrors that often turn abstract in the imagination.

For McQueen, the boundary between the conventional and the unconventional has always been porous at best. His movies unfold, thrillingly, on a scale between classical narrative and radical form, and he is versatile enough to adjust the slider according to the material. In “Hunger” (2008), “Shame” (2011), and “12 Years a Slave” (2013), he transfigured various abuses of the body into stark tableaux of spiritual torment, and his camera looked on with unflinching, almost ritualized composure, as if it were recording the Stations of the Cross. But his gaze relaxed considerably, and beautifully, amid the communal panoramas of “Small Axe,” in which joy commingled openly with sorrow, and singing and dancing became their own forceful assertions of life.

“Blitz,” too, is filled to bursting with music. Hans Zimmer’s dread-infused score at times evokes the drone of planes and the scream of sirens, but McQueen practically cues up an orchestra in jubilant response. He steers us through the red lights of a night club where Rita and Marcus once embraced with loving abandon, and through a lavish dining hall where a Black jazz band performs for white partyers. In his most audacious stroke, McQueen dramatizes the ghostly purgatory of an Underground station where newly arrived spirits, some of whom aided George on his journey, stand transfixed by song. “Blitz” shows us their courage, if not the train that will bear them onward.♦

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