Blitz (2024) - Caricatured London wastes away in Steve McQueen’s wartime drama

                                                                                                       Credit: allocine.fr

Steve McQueen has never been one to shy away from difficult topics. 12 Years a Slave, perhaps his most recognised film, a depiction of the life of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) from his kidnapping through to his work on plantations in Louisiana, won McQueen Best Picture, making him the first black British producer and director to do so. Only last year, his documentary Occupied City, a study of Amsterdam from Nazi occupation through to protests and the pandemic, competed for L’Œil d’or at Cannes. It comes as no surprise, then, that the traumatic past of London during the Second World War, the Blitz, would be an attractive topic to tackle amidst tales of Northern Ireland hunger strikes (Hunger) and experiences of the West Indian community of London during the 1960s (Small Axe). Unfortunately, Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan in titular roles, lacks just about everything its predecessors had that made them so successful.

Ronan is Rita, a single mother living in Stepney Green with her only son George (Heffernan) and her father Gerald (essentially a cameo role for The Jam’s Paul Weller). After a particularly trialling air raid, it is with a heavy heart that Rita decides to evacuate George on the next train out of London for his safety. But George is having none of it – barely an hour into his journey, he jumps off with the intent of making his way straight back to his mother.

Blitz is supposedly a depiction of a dark period in which evil was not just dropping bombs from the sky – Britain had its fair share of it too, from robbers through to racism. Of recent years, the banality of war and evil has captured attention, with films such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest garnering praise and accolades: what comes out of Blitz, excellent sets and costumes aside, is a sense of early 2000s, a film seen a hundred times before, one that feels deeply anti-climactic and dramatized. What should be an odyssey of sorts, as George treks across unfamiliar territory and Rita desperately searches for her son, falls victim to a staggering lack of pacing. George spends all of fifteen minutes in the countryside before landing back in central London, a mere hour’s walk away from home. For a child, this is certainly a long way, but bringing him so close so early in the narrative removes all sense of strangeness that otherwise makes a displacement from home so scary. Rita, too, spends about a scene and a half looking for George (asking three people if they have seen her boy) before enlisting in a shelter organised by the socialist community. She also sings the film’s original song, Winter Coat, during a BBC radio show broadcast organised at the factory where she works, designed to boost morale by bringing ‘ordinary talent’ to the masses: it’s corny, and unnecessary, and the strangely large role music plays in the film – from Rita’s performance through to musicians Weller and Benjamin Clementine’s appearances – feels off, like there was a subplot there that was only half erased.

To be very fair with Ronan, she was not given much to work with. Her character is a cardboard cutout of ‘mother’, ‘factor worker’, ‘daughter’, with supporting performances from Weller and Harris Dickinson – playing Jack, a firefighter who briefly defends Rita, briefly helps her look for George, briefly disappears from the narrative, all with a stony face – doing very little to make up for the damage. Everything is surface level, almost upsettingly so: there are brief attempts at political commentary, from Leigh Gill’s underground socialism movement, to the factory girls seizing Rita’s fifteen minutes of fame on air to call for the tube stations to be opened as shelter, much to the alarm of the evil foreman (Joshua McGuire), indifferent to the working conditions of his female employees (see either Les Misérables or Suffragette for an actually good portrayal of this). Questions of race are, alarmingly, simply glossed over – racist schoolboy taunts permeate the beginnings of the film for George, who is biracial, before he finds solace on his journey in the safe hands of Ife (Clementine), a Nigerian ARP warden who teaches him – in one night – what it is to be black. From there, George ends up in the unsavoury hands of Albert (Stephen Graham) and his goons, who enlist him to loot abandoned buildings and rob corpses with them. Never is the caricatural nature of Blitz’s characters as palpable as it is at this stage. From the angelic warden who puts an end to a racist outburst with nothing but a stern tone, through to the laughable troupe of robbers, who cackle in fake Cockney as they rip earrings off a dead woman (I’m still unsure whether to compare them to Dickens characters or to the hungry-for-gold bandits in Stephen Spielberg’s adventure film The Goonies), Blitz truly drains London of all its character, playing it safe to such an extent that it inevitably feels empty. Coming out of the cinema, I was concerned by only one thing – that my friend, who had never before seen a Saoirse Ronan film, would not retain this memory of her.