‘Blitz’ Keeps Calm And Carries On…Kind of Dully

Life during wartime—with a dash of British imperialist racism—is Steve McQueen’s primary focus in the tender but oddly unengaging Blitz, his “Keep Calm and Carry On” snapshot of a white working mother and the half-black son she’s desperate to protect from Nazi bombs. The premise lets McQueen fill the screen with handsomely mounted set pieces of harrowing destruction, but those sequences are few and far between. Most of time, he settles for dramatically undernourished scenes of family intimacy, bureaucratic frustration, bigoted bullies, and fleeting friends. It’s paint-by-numbers petty behavior punctuated with noble valor: diverting but never really enthralling.

BLITZ  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written by: Steve McQueen
Starring: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Alanna Ubach
Running time: 120 mins

At a time when the German Luftwaffe hammered London with its blitzkrieg of bombing runs, the prudent option for families with children was to transport their minors out to the countryside for safe keeping. So single mom Rita (Saoirse Ronan) dutifully takes the resentful George (Elliot Heffernan) to a train station crowded with other parents and their kids. “I hate you,” he tells her on the platform, then storms off, stone-faced. The steely resentment make sense: his black immigrant father was long since deported after a street scuffle, leaving Rita and her father Gerald (Paul Weller) to raise the boy by themselves. And now it’s George’s turn to be shuffled off. 

He won’t have it, and after a brief spell in a passenger car, George impulsively jumps off the moving train to start his trek back to London. So begins McQueen’s version of a classic boy’s adventure that tips its hat to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens without really earning its own distinctive resonance.

Blitz keeps George and Rita apart from each other for the bulk of its running time, during which neither one of them really does anything of note. George mostly just dodges the authorities and watches the carnage; Rita, in between shifts at a munitions factory, occasionally sings but mostly frets about her peripatetic son. They survive, no doubt; but they’re essentially passive witnesses to the churning wheels of war.

There’s a formalist tendency in McQueen’s films that, at its worst, encourages an emotional disconnect. His background as conceptual artist is most obvious in his previous film, Occupied City, a contemplative four-hour documentary filled with seemingly trivial fixed-space vistas of Amsterdam while a narrator fussily describes site-specific atrocities committed while under Nazi control.  

Blitz, in contrast, feels like his most mainstream film—to his credit, McQueen resists that tendency to privilege an abstract shot over a more conventional framing. But the normie encounters feel too staid, especially when racially-charged. The local boys who call George a “black bastard” are central-casting twits, while an African-British solider George befriends is a moral lodestar who scolds narrow-minded white folk in a bomb shelter for hanging a bed sheet between themselves and a group of Indians. The righteously benevolent soldier’s name, incidentally, is Ife, which means “love” in Nigerian—just in case you want more of a confirmation that UK’s multi-culti are pure of heart and the whites are sneering jerks.

Ironically, the moments that hit hardest and feel the most nuanced are McQueen’s impressionistic compositions. The shimmering slivers of moonlight reflected in the English Channel as war planes glide menacingly overhead; the whistling bombs freefalling through a pitch-black sky; the utter destruction writ large in wide vistas of urban rubble. These are glimpses of the eerier cinematic experience that might have defined Blitz—and made it detonate with much greater impact.