From Empire of the Sun to Au Revoir les Enfants, there’s been no shortage of films that show us World War II through the eyes of a child. Youthful innocence can magnify the horrors of war, as it does in shattering dramas like Come and See or the animated Grave of the Fireflies. But then there’s Hope and Glory, John Boorman’s 1987 portrait of his boyhood years during the Blitz. It’s the rare film to treat life during wartime with a buoyant sense of adventure.
The wonderful new movie Blitz is a sadder, more somber look at a time when German bombs rained down on London. The filmmaker Steve McQueen plunges us right into the chaos and devastation: the falling bombs, the burning buildings and the utter randomness of death and survival. But Blitz, while not exactly a movie for children, is nonetheless a story about a child, and it has powerful moments of wonderment, humor and even joy.
It follows a 9-year-old boy named George, played by the captivating newcomer Elliott Heffernan. It’s 1940, and as the nightly air raids grow worse and worse, George’s mother, Rita, played by a luminous Saoirse Ronan, decides to send him to the countryside, where hundreds of thousands of English children were sent during the war. George doesn’t want to go, but his mom tells him, "It’s gonna be great. You’re going to make new friends."
It may sound like a familiar, even cliché, scene, but beneath the stiff-upper-lip conventions, McQueen is up to something pointed and even subversive. George is the son of a white mother and a Black father — a Grenadian immigrant who was unjustly deported years earlier, as we see in a harrowing flashback.
George never knew his dad, but he knows firsthand the racism his dad experienced. That’s why he can’t bear to be separated from his mother and his grandfather, played by the great singer-songwriter Paul Weller. And so, not long into his journey, George leaps from the train and heads back to London.
Blitz follows him from one peril to the next. There are sweet moments of uplift, like when he rides the rails with three boys also making their way home. The story also takes some darkly Dickensian turns, like when George meets a gang of robbers who are exploiting the Blitz to their crooked advantage.
In one moving chapter, George is aided by a friendly air-raid warden named Ife, nicely played by Benjamin Clementine. Ife is a Nigerian immigrant, and almost certainly the first Black man George has ever seen in a position of authority.
It’s here that the profundity of McQueen’s vision comes into focus. He may be working in a more classical mode than he did in historical dramas like Hunger and 12 Years a Slave, but there’s something quietly radical about his perspective. He’s showing us an England that was more racially diverse and more racially divided than most movies of the period ever acknowledged.
At times, Blitz plays like a prequel to McQueen’s 2020 anthology series Small Axe, a vibrant portrait of the West Indian community of London where he grew up. It also has some overlap with Occupied City, his 2023 documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam — a very different film about a city under siege.
Race isn’t the only thing on McQueen’s mind. He also salutes the crucial role women played in the war effort — women like George’s mom, Rita, who by day works in a munitions factory, and by night volunteers in an underground shelter. Once Rita learns that George is lost in London, Blitz becomes the heartrending tale of a mother and child trying to find each other across a bombed-out landscape — a smoky ruin in Adam Stockhausen’s brilliant production design.
For all these stark and apocalyptic images, the London we see in Blitz also pulses with life. The use of music throughout is inspired, and I don’t just mean Hans Zimmer’s brooding score. McQueen guides us into a dance hall where Black musicians perform for white partygoers, and through a busy pub where George’s granddad tickles the ivories.
One terrific scene unfolds on the factory floor, where Rita, a gifted singer, cheers up the crowd with a song — an original tune, as it happens, co-written by McQueen and Nicholas Britell. The music in these moments never feels like just a diversion. These are songs of defiance, and in them you can hear a nation’s very will to survive.
Copyright 2024 NPR
