Blitz movie review: Steve McQueen’s World War II survival drama is his most sentimental film yet

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This is one of the many ways in which the system insidiously reduces its people to mere subjects, while expecting them to maintain an unreasonable stoicism in the face of tremendous, unprecedented adversity. Rita goes to work diligently, sings an inspirational song on the radio when she is told to, and is forced to make an impossible decision when it comes to her only son, George. Would he be safer in the countryside, away from her, or would he stand a better chance in London, where she can watch over him? She does what she sees everyone around her doing. But it doesn’t take too long for Rita to regret her choices.

George is upset with her as well, and he snaps angrily at her as his train pulls out of the station. But an hour into his journey, he makes a strong-headed decision of his own. George pulls up his socks, shows some of that stiff upper lip energy that the politicians have been talking about, and jumps off the moving train. What unfolds across the next hour and a half is a wonderfully old-fashioned epic about survival and strength. As Rita struggles with guilt in London, George goes on an episodic homeward journey, during which he encounters a string of colourful characters.

The most memorable of them is a Nigerian-born soldier named Ife. It is through this character that McQueen hammers home the mission statement of his movie. George is so used to being bullied for the colour of his skin that he has grown to despise it. “I’m not Black,” he declares when Ife spots him all alone, and escorts him to a shelter. George explains that he has never met his father, who was deported from England before he was born. We are, however, introduced to his dad in a moving flashback sequence that shows the origins of his romance with Rita, followed by the racist violence that he was subjected to only a few minutes later.

The kindness that Ife shows George influences every subsequent choice that he makes in his journey. And even though the movie consciously assigns a timeline to the events by having characters spell out how long it has been since George was separated from his mother — Blitz essentially unfolds across a couple of days — his journey feels never-ending. Not in a bad way. Having adopted a heightened reality tone, McQueen avoids sending George down some truly dark narrative avenues, but this doesn’t mean that boy is immune to predators. The always menacing Stephen Graham shows up as a thief who briefly recruits George into his operation. But this entire chapter feels more like a vessel for McQueen to make broad points about the class divide that his country is still crippled by, and curiously enough, to insert a random music sequence in the middle of all the mayhem.

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By evoking Charles Dickens at every turn, the filmmaker is able to hold a mirror up to his fellow countrymen and women in a language with which they are familiar. George’s racial identity makes an already impossible situation even more difficult, and the absurdity of this idea isn’t lost on McQueen, who has tackled similarly thorny themes in his past work. But the quasi-fable nature of Blitz means that it lacks a certain immediacy that is so crucial for a story like this to work as a whole. Blitz is hardly the treacly train wreck that Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit was, but you could almost imagine a future in which George runs into that film’s protagonist, Johannes, if only to give him one of his signature scowls and walk away.

Blitz
Director – Steve McQueen
Cast – Saoirse Ronan, Elliot Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham
Rating – 4/5