Steve McQueen’s much-anticipated study of ordinary Londoners’ travails during the Luftwaffe’s raids on their city begins with a characteristically striking visual. A firefighter loses control of his hose and gets knocked out by the flailing nozzle. While buildings burn behind them, his colleagues fight to gain control of the apparatus as it twirls and bobs like a malign serpent. This is the sort of image that gained McQueen renown as a visual artist and set his early features aside from the conventional pack. One thinks of the urine being swept down the corridor of HM Prison Maze in Hunger.
There is a little more such outsider flair in the action that follows. The film swells with the best of British and Irish talent – notably Saoirse Ronan as a distraught mother – and does good work investigating neglected corners of the wartime legend. But, for the most part, Blitz, which has its first screening at a gala premiere at London Film Festival today, turns out to be a disappointingly conventional affair. One can hardly a imagine a greater contrast with McQueen’s treatment of Amsterdam during the war in his recent Occupied City. You didn’t find Hans Zimmer, his blares unmistakable in Blitz, scoring that gruellingly austere documentary.
We are among a family of three in east London. Ronan plays a hard-working single mum, Rita. As her dad, Paul Weller, late of The Jam, confirms he has a face for the war years. The newcomer Elliott Heffernan is George, her son, who is of mixed ethnicity. It is 1940, and, as the raids increase in intensity, children are being evacuated to the countryside. George is reluctant to comply and leaves his mother with a scowl as the train pulls from the station. Later, he and some new pals leap from the carriage and make their way hopefully back to London.
The film suffers from some juddering shifts in tone and genre. Those scenes on the train suggest nothing so much as the plucky mischief of contemporaneous Ealing films. Later on, in McQueen’s weirdest gamble, the film rubs too close to an indestructible London masterpiece. A young woman encounters George, now back in the city, on an errand and lures him to a den of villains led by a ragged Stephen Graham. Before long a reluctant George is thieving on their command. Whether the parallels with Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – with a Nancy, a Fagin and, maybe, Kathy Burke as a distaff Bill Sikes – are intended or not, the starkness of the comparison is too much to process in an otherwise sober film.
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The gang are there, partly, to illustrate that, though the in-it-together Blitz spirit is not exactly a myth, there was also a degree of looting and robbing from the dead. The problem is that the citizens here are either one or the other. Rita watches stirring socialist speeches in the underground and joins in the singalongs while her son is being persuaded to rip the diamond rings off hardening fingers in (I assume) the annihilated Café de Paris. Life was not so binary.
There is a sense of McQueen working through a checklist. We get something on Londoners demanding that the tube stations be kept open as shelters. Ronan reveals her strong singing voice – and stands in for working women – when the BBC visits the armaments factory where she toils daily. Leigh Gill turns up as the real-life activist Mickey Davies to make a speech that gestures forward to the British Labour Party’s famous victory in 1945.
Unsurprisingly, McQueen also touches on the black experience during the war. There is, however, little of the poetic subtlety that characterised his films on Londoners of colour in the Small Axe sequence. Benjamin Clementine gives a lovely performance as a British-African air-raid warden, but even his best efforts can’t save a clunkily written scene – based on a real incident, to be fair – that finds him speaking successfully against racial segregation in the shelters.
Still, for all the disappointments, McQueen has delivered a grand mainstream entertainment that puts pressure on the tear ducts as it uncovers unspoken truths. Young Heffernan owns the juvenile lead. Ronan has few big scenes, but she sinks into the period and location with all the conviction we have come to expect. It remains perfectly possible that, come January, she will receive a best-supporting-actress nomination for Blitz to set beside an expected best-actress nod for The Outrun.
Blitz is due to open in cinemas on Friday, November 1st, and stream on Apple TV+ from Friday, November 22nd
