In London, late in 1940, the German bombs fall, erupting into an inferno of buildings gutted by glowing orange flame. People die right in their living rooms, seated in their armchairs. In the streets, the air-raid sirens scream as surging civilians surround a barricaded underground train station, trying to get the police to let them in. This is the desperate face of war. And yet…life goes on. Many of the buildings look like skeletons, but the shops and markets stay open, by day people walk the streets, and the swank patrons of a dance club party into the night…
As a filmmaker, the British director Steve McQueen might be one of the last old-school classicists. That’s not necessarily the first thing you think of when you see a McQueen film like “12 Years a Slave,” with its lacerating vision of human cruelty and resilience, or “Hunger,” about the Irish prison hero Bobby Sands. In those two movies, McQueen turned courage and suffering into daunting art. Yet McQueen has always possessed a storytelling technique that’s seamless and accessible and, in its way, quite commercially polished. You feel that in every moment of “Blitz,” his lavish drama set during the Nazi bombing of London that went on for eight months starting in September 1940.
As the film opens, firefighters combat a building engulfed in flame, and a firehose whips around like a giant snake; it’s the film’s way of saying that war is a beast that’s now been unleashed. McQueen, in an ominous motif, positions his camera just under the high-explosive bombs as they fall from the night sky, and he shows us the flow of panic and anxiety on the ground below.
“Blitz,” befitting a film set in the European epicenter of World War II, has its share of destructive spectacle. But it is not, primarily, an action war film. It’s a human drama. What may take you by surprise, if you’re a McQueen fan, is what a shockingly conventional and middle-of-the-road Hollywood-style movie it is. Taken on its own terms, “Blitz” is well done, but it could almost be a Barry Levinson Oscar-bait movie from 1992.
The central character, George (Elliott Heffernan), is a 9-year-old boy with a downbeat, sly-eyed look who, early on, joins the more than 500,000 children who are being evacuated from London. His mother, Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a munitions worker, has placed him on a train, and George so resents the fact that he has to leave her and his grandfather, the genteel piano-playing George (a nice turn by the Jam’s Paul Weller), that he tells her he “hates” her and sits stoically as the train takes off, ignoring Rita as she runs in her smart red suit to keep up with him, in what feels like one of those vintage heartstring-tugging old-movie goodbyes.
Where is George being sent? The film never fully spells that out (which is a bit odd), though presumably he’ll be well looked after. George, however, is having none of it. Before long, he throws his travel briefcase off the train and a moment later leaps off right after it, landing in the lush green countryside. The film then charts his journey back to London and, once he gets there, back to his neighborhood — a pint-sized Candide odyssey in which he keeps meeting people who try to help him (or, in one case, force him to join a Dickensian gang of thieves), only to see fate hand him off to the next encounter. The episodes arrive like clockwork, and after a while we realize that’s the form of the movie. The authorities, who know George has gone missing, are after him too.
Meanwhile, we follow the fortunes of Rita, who in her ordinary-lass way is so pert and blonde and feisty that, in her factory head scarf, she could practically be the poster image of a British Rosie the Riveter. (At one point someone literally refers to her as lovely Rita.) “Blitz” is well-staged, well-acted, and given a creamy deluxe wartime period-piece sheen by the cinematographer Yorick Le Saux. Hans Zimmer’s score sprinkles in discordant notes of dread. But this is mostly the war diary as inspirational crowd-pleaser.
It’s also an ardently traditional message movie about race and tolerance. George, who is Black, never knew his father, Marcus (CJ Beckford). There’s a flashback to Rita and Marcus dancing and canoodling in a hot jazz club in the early ’30s, but as they leave the club, Marcus is taunted and attacked by white thugs, and the bobbies, of course, respond by carting him away. That’s the last we’ll see of him. George endures his own share of racist bullying, but when he lands in a London shelter, where someone has tried to cordon off the Jewish refugees, the movie offers us a mini lecture about how this — and, implicitly, what George has been facing — is the very force the country is fighting in Hitler. To say that this liberal lesson is tidy isn’t to say that it’s wrong.
McQueen, who wrote and directed “Blitz,” has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that “Blitz” ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex. Rita has no hidden quirks, no trace of a dark side. She’s simply a valiant mother, with a lovely singing voice, who tries to reunite with her son — and, at one point, takes a stand in solidarity with her colleagues at the Works Wonders factory. George scowls a lot, but he’s a plucky and resourceful kid who earns our admiration along with our empathy. At one point he meets a Nigerian expat, Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), whose job is to tell people to turn off their lights during the nightly blackout. He’s such a good-hearted character that we bask in his benevolence. Upon meeting Ife, George tells him that he — George — is not Black. (This reflects his ambivalence at having grown up without his father.) But later on, after reconnecting with Ife, George changes his tune; he sees, and embraces, who he is. Meanwhile, Rita connects with a soldier, Jack (Harris Dickinson), who looks, in an oblique way, like he could turn out to be the fellow for her.
Does “Blitz” transport you? In a literal way, yes. McQueen recreates London during the Blitz with such you-are-there detail and, at moments, such devastating smoky hellscape grandeur that we feel we know the place, and its citizens too. Yet there’s something a tad generic about the movie’s journey. Wartime has a way of bringing out the best and the worst in people and everything in between. But there’s a stiff-upper-lip nobility to “Blitz,” as there was to Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast.” It’s hard not to be touched by it, but the movie, for all its craft, feels muffled by good intentions.