Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens with a blast: a water hose meant to put out a conflagration malfunctions because of excessive pressure, jerking about like an anaconda on drugs.
London during the Blitz – the nearly nine-month-long aerial bombardment by Germany during World War II – is similarly struggling to maintain control. Bombs rain down from the sky every night, forcing people out of their homes and into shelters. Looters are on the prowl, rudely plucking valuables from still-warm corpses. Children are being separated from their families and sent into the countryside. A nine-year-old boy disagrees with this government policy.
George (Elliott Heffernan) wants to be back home with his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) and pet cat Olly. But George loses his way, instead stumbling into corners of London that might never have revealed itself to him except for the war.
At a shopping arcade filled with imperialist tableaux, or through an encounter with a black policeman, the biracial boy witnesses racism at work as well as in check. George sees both the zenith of humanity and its nadir, represented by Stephen Graham in a chilling cameo as a criminal.
Meanwhile, George’s mother is on her own path to self-discovery. Initially unaware of George’s disappearance, Rita volunteers at a shelter.
The 120-minute movie is out on Apple TV+. In its attentiveness to a child’s view of the chaos of war, Blitz has a lineage as varied as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987). George’s rude coming-of experience, which is portrayed with precocious sensitivity by first-time actor Elliott Heffernan, produces the most compelling scenes in a film that doesn’t quite come together.
McQueen’s uneven script doesn’t give the other actors, especially the talented Saoirse Ronan, enough room to explore their characters. The initially promising Rita take a backseat to George’s travails. Harris Dickinson can be spotted in the crowd too, trying to make his presence count.
The movie’s visual scheme amply compensates for the storytelling clunkiness. The sumptuously produced movie has the look and feel of the old-fashioned sweeping war epic.
French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s striking visual scheme is grand but intimate too, vivid without being overwhelming, whether it’s at an underground railway station or a nightclub that will soon be reduced to rubble.
Sluggishly staged passages and a diffused focus keep McQueen’s ambition of providing a bottom-up view of the war in check. Some of McQueen’s bolder ideas survive the imperative to keep George on the move from one crisis to the next.
At least for some people, the conflict is an opportunity for an equal footing otherwise denied to them, such as the dwarf Mickey (Leigh Gill), who entertains shelter inmates, or Rita’s co-workers, who disrupt a patriotic gathering to demand their rights. While celebrating England’s much-vaunted “Keep calm and carry on” spirit, Blitz partially reveals a society as it has always been and might continue to be after the war has ended.