Austin Film Festival Review: Blitz

It seems that every contemporary British filmmaker needs to make an immersive film about Britain at war. Sam Mendez had 1917, Christopher Nolan had Dunkirk, and now Steve McQueen has Blitz.

Unlike his peers, McQueen relocates the action to the Home Front. That’s in keeping with the Shame director's most recent works, exploring the racial dynamics of urban Britain – most especially, what it is to be Black and British. In his critically lauded BBC series Small Axe, he gave a history of sorts of London’s West Indian community between the 1960s and 1980s. Those dates are vital, as that was the time of the Windrush Generation, when people in the Caribbean were invited by the British government to move to the UK and help rebuild its shattered post-war economy. It was a time of diversification, integration, and ghettoization, and completely different to the London of 1940.

Back then, there were almost no non-white people in Britain, sub-one-percent of the population, and so young George (Elliott Heffernan) is always going to stand out – the son of a missing black father and a white mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan). The only times he sees anyone like him is in cartoonish, minstrelesque depictions of sugar cane workers in sweet shop window displays. But he has his mum, and his grandad (Paul Weller, making his unexpected acting debut at age 66), and they sing songs around the piano and have a luverly cup of tea, because they’re British and it’s the 1940s and some stereotypes are based in reality.

And then the bombs drop. This is the early stages of the Blitz, the German Luftwaffe’s prolonged bombing campaign against civilians. In response, the government enacted Operation Pied Piper, sending city kids off to the countryside, out of peril’s way. Rita has seemingly no choice but to send George off to an uncertain future – one made all the more dangerous by his eternal outsider status. But, like all good East End boys, he loves his mum, jumps off the train, and wends his way through a bombed-out and hate-filled London.

In George’s odyssey, McQueen attempts to emulate and skewer the classic British boys' own adventures by juxtaposing it with social realism, but it ends up divided between the two instincts. Blitz is also burdened by a surprisingly leaden script filled with paper-thin Cockney stereotypes. (And, honestly, would it have hurt McQueen to have set Blitz in any of the other cities affected by the mass bombing campaigns and relocations?)

Part of the problem is that McQueen tries to cram too much of the early days of the Blitz into his story, from rationing to looting – the latter captured in a baffling rewriting of Oliver Twist with Steve McQueen as a shellshocked Bill Sikes. Sometimes it just feels like McQueen’s not quite worked out why he’s included some elements. There’s a subplot about people being prevented from using the London Underground as bomb shelters, with every authority figure portrayed as an inhumane jobsworth (as in, “I can’t do that, it’s more then my job’s worth”). However, it turns out they were in the right, as in a final sequence that seems solely intended to give McQueen one more big immersive moment.

And there’s no denying that McQueen shows his extraordinary talent as a filmmaker in those moments. The opening scene of nameless firefighters trying in vain to stop a catastrophic blaze is jawdropping and terrifying. Honestly, if you want to understand what the population of Gaza is going through right now, scenes of mountains of rubble and seemingly untouched corpses with their lungs blown out by air pressure may be your best primer. But as a depiction of being Black during the Blitz, it’s as imprecise as a nighttime bombing raid.

Blitz

D: Steve McQueen
UK, 120 min., Texas Premiere

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