“Blitz” - Film Review
Writer/director Steve McQueen is back with Blitz, the first feature-length narrative film since his criminally underrated 2018 flick, Widows. In 2020, McQueen released his anthology series, Small Axe, that told various stories of England in the ’60s and ’80s. Blitz takes McQueen even further back in time to 1940s London. The film’s name comes from the German bombing campaign that lasted eight months and destroyed much of the city of London. While Blitz is created under McQueen’s signature eye, the film is stifled by the expectations put upon a period piece.
Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a single mother to her son George (Elliott Heffernan), and the two live with Gerald (Paul Weller), Rita’s father. In the summer of 1939, Operation Pied Piper began and over 800,000 children were evacuated from London to safety until the war ended. George was not one of those children because Rita couldn’t bear the thought of being without him. However, as the bombing intensifies, Rita makes the choice to send George away. While on the train, George decides to escape and make his way back to his mother, but finds himself in peril.
courtesy of Apple TV+
If Emilia Perez has shown us anything, it’s that there is no movie that cannot be turned into a musical. Rarely do you watch a movie and think, this is begging to be a musical, yet that is the sensation that Blitz leaves with its audience. Music and the use of sound are already intrinsically woven into the DNA of the film. Rita performs a song for the BBC, her father plays the piano nightly, and Ife (Benjamin Clementine), the kind police officer who helps George, sings while he completes his nightly rounds. Even the rhythmic nature of Rita’s factory job could easily lend itself to song. McQueen has created a story that relies on music, and it’s a shame that Blitz isn’t a full-blown musical in its own right. A different approach would have allowed Blitz to separate itself from the trappings of the genre.
Blitz will likely find its way into the classrooms of high school history teachers. The film gives a broad overview of life in World War II London and is a relatively accurate period piece. One of the film’s strongest components is that it doesn’t shy away from the racism on the homefront. So often, World War II is taught that it’s the good guys against the bad guys. That everyone who fought against Hitler was also against his ideals. The reality is that people could be anti-Hitler, but also be racist toward their neighbors. Blitz makes that reality one of its main plot points and it’s an important part of history that is rarely shown in this style of movie.
courtesy of Apple TV+
It’s hard to see Blitz as anything beyond its well-done interpretation of historical events. The flashbacks of pre-war life slow down the present-day narrative (that somehow takes place over the course of a day and a half). Ronan, who is usually the standout in any film she touches, is dimmed. She is given too little time to show the emotional distance her character has traveled. Her decision to send George away is quick, and it would have been interesting to see how she came to this conclusion. The same can be said about how she immediately recovered from losing George. Blitz is covering too much ground and misses the personal, emotional journey that would make the film special.
Even if Blitz doesn’t entirely distinguish itself from other films about this period in time, it still provides an important perspective and adds context to our collective history. We are doomed to repeat what we cannot learn from, and there is much within Blitz that is all-too-relevant today.
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