Blitz

It is 1940 in London and with Luftwaffe bombs raining from the sky, single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) on a train bound for the English countryside to keep him out of harm’s way. George, though, feeling abandoned, jumps from the moving train not long into the voyage and treks back to London by foot, recounted in a series of dramatic episodes amid Germany’s continual aerial bombardment. It’s the framework of an adventure story, but writer/director Steve McQueen essentially shines a white light on that that framework to reveal what truly lurks beneath the facade of so-called Blitz Spirit. The opening image of firemen attempting to corral an out-of-control firehose amid burning buildings suggests London is battling itself as much as The Blitz, while also foretelling a movie of fewer inspirational images than dark ones. George briefly falls in with a gang of thieves who loot the dead bodies in the bombed-out West End Café de Paris, a ghoulish sequence that might have roots in Dickens but also makes it feel for all the world like they are grave robbers who have mystically descended to the ocean floor the morning of April 16, 1912, raiding the bodies of the sunken Titanic. It’s the kind of image that might a haunt a nine-year-old boy for the rest of their life.

McQueen inverts adventure stories, but he also inverts Britain’s famed Blitz slogan Keep Calm and Carry On, the one telling its citizens to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of the horrifying irregular. Ok, McQueen seems to say, if you want to see what a normal 1940 London looked like, I’ll show it to you. Indeed, you will notice straight away that Rita’s skin is white, and that George’s skin is black. His father, Grenadian immigrant father Marcus (CJ Beckford), is glimpsed only in flashback, deported after a confrontation with a pair of boorish white men, evoking the kind of bigotry typically scrubbed from movies about The Blitz lest it compromise the heroism. That we hardly get to know Marcus is deliberate, putting us in his son’s shoes, and just as George’s father vanishes, so does a briefly emergent father figure, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a night watchman who briefly befriends the boy before perishing offscreen. Ife feels like McQueen’s version of the Magical Negro character, even giving a rousing speech to his fellow Londoners imploring them to transcend their racial bias. The speech, it’s too good to be true, and so is Ife, gone almost as soon as he arrives, like he’s just a figment of the imagination.

“Blitz” is not seen only through the George’s eyes but through Rita’s too. An aspiring singer, she is selected by the BBC to perform live on a wartime radio broadcast, belting out a ballad in the munitions factory where she works to help keep spirits up, and in this moment, she holds the whole room, the whole of Britain, in the palm of her hand. When she concludes, her co-worker rushes the microphone to demand the government open more air raid shelters, leading others on the arms manufacturing line, including Rita, to join the spur of the moment protest. If the former functions as the fantasy of everyone being in this together, the latter punctures that fantasy, a duality lived in Ronan’s commanding turn. In bright red lipstick and blue overalls, she virtually breathes Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring to life, turning her a wartime symbol into something more, patriotic and pissed off. 

It’s the kind of duality that the 11-year-old Heffernan cannot be expected to manage. And rather than using the camera to express the inner conflict undoubtedly brewing in George on account of his identity, McQueen often seems more content to just reaffirm the character’s oppression, such as in his encountering a collection of colonialist caricatures in an Empire Arcade display. In that way, however, Heffernan proves plenty effective. In his tight-lipped expression, he seems to virtually wear a lifelong scar, and so, rather than finding the wherewithal in the midst of such terror to survive, it’s as if George’s emotional strength stems from what he has already been made to endure.