Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen, 2024)

Very rarely these days does a film make every right visual decision for two solid hours, but Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which focuses on the WWII air raids on London in 1940, does precisely that. As the feats of technical innovation and virtuosity throughout Blitz amply prove, McQueen is one of the finest mainstream filmmakers since Spielberg. Saoirse Ronan, radiant as ever, stars as the mother of a young boy named George (played by the truly fantastic Elliott Heffernan), whom she puts on a train to travel to a new school out in the countryside under much duress, as a way of attempting to protect him from the bombs falling all over their city. George has grown up there with her and her father (Paul Weller, in his first feature film role) and is quite reluctant to leave. So he jumps off of the train a short distance into the journey, in order to find his way back to his mother in London, traversing the challenging gauntlet of a war-torn cityscape nearly the entire way. McQueen refers to everything from 1917 to Dunkirk to Titanic in bursts of visual and technical homage, but with an efficiency that doesn’t call attention to itself in the ways that those movies did, instead keeping his story focused on the mission of its small but mighty hero. McQueen is, no question about it, a master storyteller.

The cast that McQueen has assembled is perfect and varied. I was excited to see Weller turn up (and didn’t even recognize him at first), alongside an excellent array of British character actors, including the great Kathy Burke in a deliciously villainous role that borders on the clever cartoonishness of a character like Cruella de Vil. And several awesome young actors in military roles, such as Harris Dickinson, leave just the right impression in the tiny acting spaces they have to fleetingly work with as the camera zooms along to George’s next picaresque encounter. Best of all perhaps is the musician Benjamin Clementine as Ife, a Nigerian-born police officer who caringly guards George through several of the key legs of his journey back to his mother and grandfather’s home. Ife first appears at a strategic moment in the film, when George is wandering around and peering into the windows of a candy shop in an open-air arcade at night, the dioramas of which contain imperial depictions of slaves on a sugar cane plantation. McQueen handles these difficult moments exactly right since we are viewing them through the eyes of a biracial child.

Some of the episodic plot turns and elaborate set pieces are fairly standard, as George’s trek leads him through Underground stations crowded with people taking shelter there, to evading some train conductors in pursuit through a trainyard, to kidnappers eager to turn a profit from stumbling upon a lost boy like George, to a nightclub crowded with revelers despite the apparent dangers, to narrow escapes from terrifying explosions, to subway tunnels dramatically flooded when the wall of one suddenly bursts right open. Never, however, do such scenes and their intricate conceptions feel tired or worn-out, mainly because of McQueen’s insistence on navigating the details in a direct yet slightly off-kilter manner. Even an image as simple as George’s kicking a rock down the street is uniquely filmed via a tracking shot low to the ground, just below the curbside, so that we see only the black & white interstices painted on the curb and George’s shoes kicking the stone along the sidewalk but pictured just from his shins down. It reminded me of the legendary Hollywood director of classic Westerns John Ford’s supposed advice to a teenage Steven Spielberg about how to get an image right on film: never put the horizon line in the middle of the screen, if you want to make the image interesting and resounding enough to keep your audience’s attention.

 

Blitz is currently screening at the wonderful Nickelodeon Cinemas at 1 Temple Street in downtown Portland, Maine.