The two films made by Steve McQueen last year - the 4 hour WWII Amsterdam documentary Occupied City, and Grenfell - were hard-core art-house projects not much seen beyond the festival circuit or the gallery. With Blitz, though, McQueen now returns with a much more mainstream proposition, one that continues Occupied City's exploration of Second World War experience (this time set in the city where McQueen was born rather than the one where he currently lives) but that also seeks, as he told Sight and Sound last month with disarming frankness, to put "bums on seats."
I hope he succeeds - although, sadly, given that the film is soon to be on Apple TV+ after a short and rather limited UK theatrical release, those seats are more likely to be sofas at home than ones in cinemas. Blitz really deserves the big screen. It's a terrific entertainment in which McQueen draws deeply on varied traditions of British WWII-centred filmmaking - from Humphrey Jennings Fires Were Started (1943) to John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) to Terence Davies - while also taking the tradition forward. The film isn't explicitly revisionist; indeed it's rather old-fashioned in its contours. But in placing a biracial protagonist - Elliott Heffernan's 9-year-old George - at the centre, it inevitably broadens the scope of World War II representation - sometimes heavy-handedly, but for the most part affectingly and excitingly.
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The plot is a quest narrative in essence: it follows George's attempt to return to his Stepney home after being reluctantly evacuated by his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a munitions factory worker and amateur singer. George never reaches the destination of his evacuation: rather, he leaps off the train in the countryside and immediately starts his perilous odyssey back to London.
George's journey allows Blitz to create a kind of picaresque panorama of WWII Britain that works at both epic and intimate levels . Whether sharing jam sandwiches with a trio of fellow-runaway brothers, bonding with the nice Nigerian blackout warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine), or being pressed into criminal service by a gang (Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham in full-on Dickensian mode), George is constantly alerted to the kindness and the cruelty that the war brings out in individuals.
Flashbacks fleshing out elements of the character's past - the racist bullying that he can't quite tell his family about; the relation between his mother and Grenadian father - are elegantly integrated without inhibiting the momentum of the quest. If the characterisation often seems slightly heightened, then that's in keeping with a child's-eye view the film gives us. There's a Boys' Own Adventure spirit at play here, McQueen is at his sharpest in the fleeting details George observes: the legs of a Punch & Judy puppeteer; a sexual encounter in the crowded Underground shelter (a space the film uses quite brilliantly throughout, right up to its most harrowing sequence).
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At times Blitz doesn't trust the audience as much as it might: just like Ellen Kuras' Lee, it also thinks that we need what the Blitz was to be explained to us - although at least here that information comes in the shape of an opening title rather than in thuddingly exposition-heavy dialogue. The film is at its weakest when it most obviously defaults to the simplifications of US-influenced contemporary identity-politics: George's Obama-esque declaration of "I am Black!" after his encounter with Ife provides him with a viable role model feels bogus. An opportunity for a more nuanced exploration of mixed race identity in the WWII context is finally squandered by McQueen's script in favour of what might play better today.
Heffernan's excellent performance - a very assured film debut - compensates for the simplification, though, conveying George's tenacity and vulnerability, and a constant, contending sense of connection and set-apartness, with great skill. The young actor creates a lovely, fond family dynamic with Ronan and with Paul Weller (in a belated, effective acting debut as George's grandfather). From the unstressed warmth of these early scenes we understand why the threat of evacuation is particularly traumatic for George. The casting is canny across the board and the film feels fully inhabited, with Leigh Hill as the firebrand Mickey Davies and Linton Kwesi-Johnson briefly glimpsed as a street-corner poet. Harris Dickinson 's role, as a returned soldier with an affection for Rita, seems an afterthought, but the actor brings a likeable spirit to this underwritten part, sweetly dogged and a little bit dopey.
In its details and textures, Blitz feels convincingly rooted in working-class wartime experience, and from its jolting opening sequence, it captures the confusion, chaos and panic of the bombing in a visceral way that puts the viewer right there. There are simply beautiful moments, too, such as the sequence in which Rita sings a song at a BBC broadcast at the factory (a convincing McQueen/Nicholas Britell composition named "Winter Coat") while the camaraderie between her and her fellow-workers (Hayley Squires and Sally Messham), and the women's dynamic with their Boss (Joshua McGuire), are perfectly judged.
The showiest sequence - an elaborate swoop around the Café de Paris - seems overly calculated to make a class point (see the posh people enjoying themselves while the world burns!) but the cut to the aftermath of the bombing of the club is chilling. And McQueen allows himself one avant garde idiosyncrasy that really works: intermittent cuts to black-and-white images of daisies from Man Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926): an emblem of hope and possibility in the midst of the conflict.
From conversations at London Film Festival, where Blitz premiered last month, it's clear that some viewers found McQueen's film too conventional in its trajectory and wanted it to go darker or weirder. But I think it's a considerable achievement - a rich evocation of our wartime past made with care and love.
Blitz is in UK cinemas from today.
