Blitz opens amid a terrifying conflagration on a nighttime city street. This is the blitzkrieg — the German bombing of London in 1940 in the early days of World War II. But as writer/director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) casts it, it's not about an entire street or even a single building on fire. It's about a loose fire hose whipping about wildly and the heavy industrial nozzle whacking an anonymous firefighter in the head as he struggles to bring it under control.
It's a moment of feral intensity and of ferocious intimacy. It brings to mind snippets from early in Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries about the 1986 nuclear plant disaster. It's just an ordinary schmoe firefighter not even thinking twice about doing a dangerous job, because the job has to be done.
Blitz is not about that firefighter. But the brutal randomness of that opening sequence sets the stage for what is to come. This is not a sentimental story about British stiff upper lips and keeping calm and carrying on. McQueen seems to be deliberately pushing back against how the British and especially the London experience of the war has been ex post facto propagandized into cheery, chipper camaraderie and complacency. Indeed, the whole "keep calm and carry on" thing was a propaganda slogan developed during the war but barely used then, and was almost entirely forgotten until it was rediscovered in 2000 and subsequently weaponized for whitewashed and commercialized nostalgia.
McQueen plays with those expectations, but smashes them at every opportunity with this tale of 9-year-old George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), who's furious that his single mom, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), has finally relented and agreed to evacuate her son to the countryside after so many other London children had already left. Blitz is about the picaresque misadventures of George as he decides to take himself home — Nazi bombs be damned — and the inadvertent horror for his mother once she is informed that the authorities who were supposed to be in charge of his safety have lost him.
McQueen is also pushing back against another sort of whitewashing of the more literal kind: The bizarre notion that, somehow, "diversity" is a 21st-century invention and that people of color haven't always been a part of history, particularly in majority-white colonial nations like Great Britain. The filmmaker has said he was inspired in this story by an old photograph of a mixed-race bombing evacuee, a small boy standing on a WWII-era railway platform. McQueen wondered what his life was like.
And so McQueen — who is Black British — builds a sketch of vibrant, multicultural life in century-ago London, partly through flashbacks of the lively jazz-club scene where Rita partied in prewar time with George's father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), an immigrant from Grenada who is no longer in the picture. But McQueen's depiction of a London that some would like to pretend never existed affectingly blossoms thanks to another immigrant George encounters: the Nigerian air-raid warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine). Ife is one of the loveliest characters depicted on screen in a long while, and McQueen sharply but gently uses the character to paint a portrait of an exuberant, diverse London. Subtly, McQueen suggests that this is very much what was worth fighting the Nazis to protect.
Yet nothing here is romanticized, either. Racism is a real and pervasive presence — the sequence in which George has his eyes opened to just how ingrained the denigration of Black people has been by the British Empire is heartbreaking — as is the opportunism of those who would take advantage of the chaos of the blitz. Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke play scavenger-thieves who descend after the bombs fall, and they rope George into their schemes. They are terrifying, akin to the Thenardiers of Les Misérables but devoid of their bleak comedy.
Blitz is McQueen's most accessible, most mainstream film yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't absolutely brutal. This is a movie about childhood adventure that is a lark — until it isn't. It's about community care and small moments of kindness from strangers in passing, and also about stomping on your neighbors in moments of panic and terror. It's wildly human, artistically masterful and completely magnificent.
Blitz
Rated PG-13
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Benjamin Clémentine
