Blitz
Steve McQueen’s fifth feature is yet another richly textured masterpiece, a devastating drama set in wartime London.
Street strife: Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan
Image courtesy of Apple TV+/Allied Film Distribution.
A panorama of London with its misshapen skyscrapers has become a common visual trope of recent cinema. And the spectacle of urban devastation in Ukraine and Gaza has equally dominated our TV screens. What we are unfamiliar with is seeing a combination of the two, as the British capital was laid waste during the bombing campaign of the Luftwaffe in 1940 and ‘41. While the destruction of London has been previously explored (recently in Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest, famously in Hope and Glory (1987) and in Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started (1943)), it is a subject surprisingly unexplored in the pantheon of war cinema. When Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens, the director immediately asserts his power as an artist and storyteller. With uncompromising elan, he plunges the viewer into the inferno of wartime hell as firefighters struggle to contain a conflagration. But the blaze is not their only enemy, as a high-powered firehose breaks free, knocking a man unconscious and rearing up like a giant serpent possessed. McQueen, working from his own screenplay, unleashes many scenes of incidental horror, as the collateral damage of the bombing strikes humanity from every direction.
Like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, he approaches the subject from the viewpoint of a child, but from a very personal perspective. Nine-year-old George Hanway (Elliott Heffernan) lives with his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather (Paul Weller) in the East End quarter of Stepney Green. He is a child of the street, and while painfully aware that he is different from the boys he plays with – his father was black – George can hold his own. As hundreds of thousands of children are being evacuated from the city for their safety, George is bundled off on a train to Somerset with a suitcase and a placard around his neck, wrenched from the arms of the mother he loves. Yet the last thing he says to her, before he takes his place on the train, is “I hate you.”
Few directors today have the finesse to combine emotion with such artistry. And this is McQueen’s most personal film – only his second feature since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013). One should not forget that he started out as a video artist, but his humanity has propelled his art form to poignant extremes. His recreation of wartime Britain is consummate, from the dingy décor and street life to the language of the period. A favourite expression of George’s grandfather is “all mouth and no trousers”; others talk of Blackpool as some kind of mecca. This is spot-on. But as much as the film is about childhood and war, it is also about racism, and how even during “the spirit of the Blitz”, bigotry ruled. The only really compassionate characters here are black, while some of the white figures verge on the Dickensian in their villainy (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke make a particularly macabre double-act). If this is laid on a little thick, McQueen has his reasons and his fifth feature goes some way to redress an imbalance. Yet whether he is exploring the intimate (the scene in which George and his mother are “playing drums” in bed exudes a devastatingly nostalgic tenderness), or the epic, the director exerts his stamp as a rare master. The close-ups of falling bombs take on an almost abstract quality; the obliterated streets a surreal aspect. Many a moment punches home with unexpected clarity. As for the standard of acting, Hans Zimmer’s score, the production design and the superlative CGI, everything is damn near faultless.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham, Leigh Gill, Mica Ricketts, CJ Beckford, Alex Jennings, Joshua McGuire, Hayley Squires, Erin Kellyman, Sally Messham, Devon McKenzie-Smith, Celeste, Heather Craney, Grace Corney, Thea Achillea, Dominic Coleman.
Dir Steve McQueen, Pro Steve McQueen, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Arnon Milchan, Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Anita Overland and Adam Somner, Screenplay Steve McQueen, Ph Yorick Le Saux, Pro Des Adam Stockhausen, Ed Peter Sciberras, Music Hans Zimmer, Costumes Jacqueline Durran, Dialect coach Sarah McGuinness.
Apple Studios/Regency Enterprises/New Regency/Working Title Films/Lammas Park-Apple TV+/Altitude Film Distribution.
120 mins. UK/USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 1 November 2024. Cert. 12A.
