‘Blitz’ Review: Saoirse Ronan in Steve McQueen’s Admirably Crafted but Overly Clichéd Tribute to London’s Survival in World War II

Intricately detailed yet broad in its brushwork, Steve McQueen’s Blitz offers a densely packed vision of London at war in 1940, as seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy (discovery Elliott Heffernan), trying to make it home to his single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan). Aptly enough, given the city where it’s set, the film is positively Dickensian in its tendency to heap misfortune on top of melodrama, though it offers relatively little of the sort of light comic relief that Charles Dickens also excelled at. But no one could quarrel with its timely message about how much ordinary folks suffer when bombs fall on civilian targets.

However, while there’s much to admire here — including some bravura sequences, top-notch craft contributions and a long-overdue effort to show that London was more racially diverse than you might guess from watching movies from the time or made later but set in the period — the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

It might all have worked better had it just loosened its waistband, giving its story and characters more room to breathe. The fact that in-demand actor Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, soon to be seen in Babygirl), barely does more here than make calf eyes at Ronan from the sidelines suggests content jetsam may have been thrown overboard somewhere along the way.

That cramped quality may effectively circumscribe Blitz’s prospects as an awards contender and diminish its event-movie potential in international markets. It’s likely to perform better as a theatrical prospect in the U.K., ahead of its Nov. 22 bow on Apple TV+, given how dearly Brits treasure all that keep calm and carry on malarkey.

From an auteurist point of view, the picture fits snugly into McQueen’s filmography. There’s an obvious overlap with the concerns and themes explored in his most recent projects — specifically the made-for-TV film series Small Axe, with its focus on the Black experience in Britain, and the documentary feature Occupied City, which paired voiceover narration describing significant events at specific addresses around Amsterdam during WWII with contemporary footage of those same sites in the present day.

In interviews prior to Blitz’s premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, McQueen has explained that it was somewhat accidental that it and Occupied City ended up coming out back-to-back. But the two certainly speak to one another from across the North Sea. Both illustrate the sufferings of capital city dwellers at the hands of the Nazis, and show that just as the war brings out some people’s best, it can draw out their worst instincts as well.

Meanwhile, McQueen has mentioned that the choice to anchor the narrative around young biracial boy was inspired by a photograph he found while researching Small Axe, of a Black child in a too-big coat and enigmatically stoic expression being evacuated during the war. Heffernan, whom McQueen and casting director Nina Gold found during an extensive casting call for the lead role of George, is a ringer for the boy. While the young star had only acted in school plays before, he takes to the spotlight well against his more experienced co-stars, with his still presence and steady, unabashed gaze.

There’s a palpable connection between him and Ronan from their first moments, where we see them snuggling at bedtime as Rita tries to reassure her son about his impending evacuation — a nationwide effort that saw 1.5 million people moved to the countryside from the cities like London, Liverpool and others that took heavy bombing from the Luftwaffe. George understandably doesn’t want to be parted from Rita, his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller, the British pop star making his acting debut here) and his cat Olly (played by feline actors Zinger and Tinkerbell), not to mention all his friends.

Though it’s not quite said, it’s clear George is also rightly anxious about meeting people beyond the metropolis who might not be used to seeing people of color. Lo and behold, not long after he boards a train with hundreds of children, he’s bullied by others. Seeing the way this is going to go, George makes the fateful decision to jump off the slow-moving steam train and head back to London.

And so George’s odyssey begins. His homeward bound journey is as fraught with mishaps, fatal accidents and unexpected moments of kindness as the one Odysseus himself took, only it doesn’t take 10 years. George hops another train and meets three brothers his age who had the same idea about turning around and heading straight back home. They share an exhilarating ride on the roof after George accepts a dare, which gives composer Hans Zimmer and his orchestra a chance to let rip with a percussive, thrumming score. Once he makes it back to the outskirts of the Smoke, he must find his way back to Stepney Green in the East End of town, a trip many a Londoner would be stumped to work out today were it not for the invention of Google Maps.

Over the course of several days, a lot happens. He makes friends with Ife (musician Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian immigrant who is working as a blackout warden. Ife’s nobility and kindness make him exactly the kind of role model of Black masculinity that George has been missing in his life, having never known the Caribbean father, Marcus (CJ Beckford, seen only in a flashback), who was unjustly deported before George was born.

But no sooner has George parted company with Ife, an event underlined with more tragedy, than he falls in with a gang of lowlife Cockney looters, led by brother and sister Albert and Beryl. As played, respectively, by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke — two of Britain’s very best character actors, even if Burke rarely works onscreen these days — the pair chew up and spit out the scenery with relish. They bring a dark comic broadness to the proceedings that’s quite welcome at this point, even as their characters are committing horrors like cutting the fingers off corpses to steal rings.

On the other side of town, Rita, at first unaware that George never made it to his destination, is having her own iconic set of Blitz experiences. Working in a munitions factory, she’s consoled over having sent George away by her besties, Tilda (Hayley Squires) and Doris (Erin Kellyman). (The lot of them, along with the rest of female workforce, are done up in Rosie the Riveter headscarves and utility pinafores; as usual, Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are right on point.) Rita, being the daughter of a pub piano man, gets to sing live when the BBC arrives for a morale-boosting outside broadcast, and Ronan soulfully executes a sweet pastiche of 1940s ditties, composed by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson. At night, they’re off to the pub to grab some fun while they can, before the air raids sound again and there’s panic in the streets.

This being the very beginning of the Blitz, McQueen includes how the authorities wouldn’t let people shelter in Underground stations at first, causing near riots at the closed gates when there was nowhere else to go. The crowds are only fractionally safer once they are let in, as we see when a bomb bursts a water main and floods one station, in a finely executed vision of chaos.

A sequence of firefighters struggling to douse a burning building with a canvas hose they can barely control likewise suggests how terrifying those early days of the bombing were. The close-ups of flames and the desaturated palette bring to mind the work of documentarian Humphrey Jennings, whose Fires Were Started (1943) and its almost abstract imagery stands as a key record of the Blitz. At points, the camera seems to rise as if lifted on a drone, to survey streets pockmarked with missing or half-eradicated buildings and smoking rubble — all of it presumably CGI but persuasively done. Occasionally, McQueen shudders and shakes the camera, creating blurs that then resolve into an aerial shot of the sea from a plane’s point of view, or a field of white daisies. The technique invokes a hallucinatory quality that calls back to McQueen’s earliest works, with their games with perspective and in-camera stunts paying tribute to silent cinema.

Such personal, freeform touches elevate Blitz, adding an artsy, astringent rawness to counter the sticky sweet use of clichés elsewhere. Because it sometimes seems that McQueen is determined to leave no hackneyed trope behind. A scene where someone tearfully chases a train leaving a platform? Check. Young women drawing stocking seams onto their bare legs with eyebrow pencils? Check. A right old knees up and sing song round the old piano because, gor’ blimey guvnor, you only live once innit? Check, check, check.

Meanwhile, nearly every moment of unbridled joy must be snuffed out with tragedy or at least bad luck. The flashback where we see Rita with Marcus in a nearly all-Black dancehall includes him giving her the St. Christopher’s medal (another cliché) that, years later, she will give to their son. Shortly after, Marcus gets into a fight and is hauled off by the police, never to be seen again.

At least their dancing, along with a later scene set in the ill-fated Café de Paris, is delicious and a sensual throwback to McQueen’s dance-driven Lovers Rock — for my money, the best and most innovative episode of Small Axe. One of the things that made the earlier film so compelling was how little really happened in it. The drama, the romance and the emotion were all enmeshed in the music and the way the characters moved to it, reacting to both the sound and to each other.

Maximalist to the hilt, Blitz is the complete opposite of Lovers Rock’s lean approach to storytelling — different in every way except, perhaps, that both films end abruptly, with the dull thud of breaking daylight and bittersweet resolution.