DAN WEBSTER:
Any student of World War II history is familiar with the story of the bombing attacks that Germany unleashed upon Great Britain during what came to be known as “the Blitz.” Beginning on Sept. 7, 1940, Britain endured such attacks both day and night for eight long months. During the initial stage, German planes dropped their loads on London 56 out of 57 straight days.
Over the next several months, other cities were hit, too, from Birmingham and Liverpool to Belfast, Northern Ireland. Yet fully half of the estimated 43,000 deaths occurred in London itself, where a million or more houses and flats were leveled. But you don’t have to read history to know any of this because dozens of movies and television shows over the decades have portrayed what occurred, the latest of which is titled, simply enough, Blitz.
Written and directed by the British filmmaker Steve McQueen, Blitz tells the familiar story—but with a twist. McQueen, who is Black, is known for films such as 12 Years a Slave (which won a 2014 Best Picture Oscar) and two BBC series, Uprising and Small Axe, all of which explore the nature and effects of racism. In Blitz the movie, McQueen adds the same kind of racially conscious theme to the usual depiction of British war history.
Saoirse Ronan stars as Rita, the single mother of a mixed-race 9-year-old boy named George (played by Elliott Heffernan). Rita labors in a munitions factory, where she and her fellow women workers face that era’s standard version of sexism. Both she and George live with her father (played by Paul Weller) in a working-class London neighborhood that, like so many others, seems to be a key target for German bombs.
Rita is concerned about George’s safety, and not just because he is, on occasion, targeted by street bullies (first racism alert). We gradually learn, too, that George’s father, after being attacked in the street, was taken away by police and deported to his native Grenada (second racism alert).
More to the point of Rita’s concern, though, is that fact that the ongoing German bombing campaign is slowly destroying whole neighborhoods at once. So when the government implements a plan to send civilians, mostly children, by train out of the city and to the relative safety of the English countryside, Rita insists that George go, too.
He is unhappy about having to leave, especially after being teased by a couple of White boys (third racism alert), which causes him to jump off the train. Blitz, then becomes a kind of road-trip tale, one that details George’s struggles to get back to his mother. Meanwhile, once informed of her son’s defection, Rita begins her own desperate attempts to find her lost boy.
What follows is a tale laden with the kinds of plot digressions and characterizations reminiscent of Charles Dickens. The various people George meets, not to mention the situations he is forced to face, could come straight out of, say, the novels Great Expectations or David Copperfield.
Some of the characters are kind, such as the gentle air warden Ife (played by Benjamin Clementine), who shepherds the boy to an underground shelter. And some are anything but, such as the members of an Oliver Twist-type gang led by a Fagin/Bill Sykes-type character (played by Stephen Graham).
In some ways, Blitz is unlike McQueen’s other work. He depends largely on computer-graphics to portray the damage done to London, set against close-up scenes of firefighters struggling to quell the flames razing whole rows of buildings. And he’s not above showing off, whether filling the screen with a magically-realistic mosaic of dancing dots (presumably to symbolize the madness of war), or by aping the style of others—one scene involves a busy nightclub and an extended single take of a waiter moving through the room that resembles what Martin Scorsese put on the screen in his 1990 film Goodfellas. None of this, however, blunts the film’s inherent power.
Ultimately, Blitz being what it is, McQueen always comes back to his own personal theme: someone Black, or at least of mixed race, cast into a uncertain world, one in which their experience—their own personal Blitz, so to speak—may be in some ways enhanced, but always ends up being imperiled, simply by the chance circumstance of their birth.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.