When his mother sends him to the country to escape the blitz, a young boy
attempts to return to London.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Steve McQueen
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, Stephen
Graham
The current vogue for colourblind casting in British historical movies and
TV shows threatens to fashion a dishonest version of Britain's past as an
unlikely racial utopia where black and Asian people didn't just fit in but
were able to rise to the highest echelons of society, even royalty. One of
the most egregious examples is the 2020 wartime drama
Summerland, in which a young mixed-race blitz evacuee is taken in by a white woman in
a lesbian relationship with a mixed-race lover. That movie goes out of its
way to highlight the homophobia of 1940s Britain while bizarrely pretending
that racism didn't exist at the time. The sexism and homophobia of Britain's
past are all fair game for movies and TV, but racism mustn't be
mentioned.
Steve McQueen isn't having any of this nonsense. Like
Summerland, his WWII drama Blitz features a young mixed-race boy, but
McQueen is brutally honest in portraying the racism of the era. So much so
that McQueen demythologises the blitz, which is always held up as an example
of British people banding together to get through hell. In McQueen's account
of the Nazi bombing raids on London it's every man for himself as the
citizens of the British capital turn feral in their attempts to survive,
trampling children as they rush for shelters and looting the corpses they
find in bombed out dancehalls.
Well, just the white people. People of colour are patronisingly painted as
angelic figures who actually do embody the myth of the blitz. Africans,
Indians and Jews all look out for one another while white people constantly
bombard them with racist abuse and put their lives in danger.
The only white characters who aren't mouth-foaming racists are cockney
pianist Gerald (Paul Weller) and his daughter Rita (Saoirse Ronan). The latter is the mother of George (Elliott Heffernan), whose
black immigrant father was deported following an incident in which he stood
up to a group of bigoted thugs. With London becoming increasingly dangerous,
Rita makes the difficult decision to send George away to the countryside.
George doesn't take this well, refusing to say goodbye to his mother as his
train departs, leaving her heartbroken. After being racially abused by a
pair of white kids, George decides to leap from the train and make his way
back to London.
What follows is a tonally jarring mix of Charles Dickens, wartime
propaganda movies, Children's Film Foundation productions and '70s Public
Information Films, often within an individual scene.
Heffernan is suitably wide-eyed but generally unconvincing as a product of
a tough East End upbringing, with nary a scratch on his nobbly knees, as are
the other child actors he encounters. Most of the adult performers aren't
any more persuasive, with only Weller convincing as a product of the era.
His is surprisingly the film's best performance, but a large part of that is
down to the singer playing the only character that doesn't come off as a
bundle of clichés. He's the only actor McQueen allows to show us how his
character is feeling rather than straight up telling us through the
director's clunky dialogue. We learn more about Gerald by the way he sips
his tea than we decipher about anyone else here.
Gerald feels like a product of a far more nuanced film than the otherwise
overwrought and over-egged Blitz. The racism of wartime Britain isn't simply highlighted, it's hammered
home as nary a scene goes by in which some villainous white figure isn't
abusing George in some manner. Conversely, George is aided by a saintly
Nigerian air raid warden (Benjamin Clementine) who at one point
dispels racial tension in a shelter with a cheesy speech that recalls the
subway scene from
Churchill, and by a mixed-race thief (Mica Ricketts) who helps him escape a
criminal gang straight out of Oliver Twist. The introduction of the latter,
lead by a reptilian Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham,
threatens to completely derail the film, so over-the-top is their awfulness.
When Burke starts making jokes using severed limbs as a prop while looting
the bombed Café de Paris, Blitz becomes unintentionally
laughable.
McQueen seizes on a formula that he cheaply repeats throughout the film. A
scene will play out in the fashion of a Children's Film Foundation
production only to end with a shock straight out of the sort of horrifying
public safety shorts that terrorised kids in the '70s (it's only short of
giving us a scene in which George climbs an electricity pylon to retrieve a
frisbee). Or we'll get a moment of musical exuberance (I'd happily risk
being bombed if I could visit the jazz clubs portrayed here) that gets
suddenly interrupted with violence. After a while it all becomes too
predictable.
And yet for all its issues, Blitz is never dull. There's
always something engaging onscreen, and there are some truly dazzling
sequences, none more so than a glimpse of the pioneering bandleader Ken
Johnson (Devon McKenzie-Smith) performing in the doomed Café de Paris. As he demonstrated with
Lovers Rock, McQueen sure knows how to shoot people dancing. Blitz is
stuffed with vignettes and glimpses of a life lived under constant threat,
but its various strands never coalesce into a satisfying narrative and most
of its characters are left short-changed, including the personality-free
Rita. There are hints at McQueen's previously demonstrated talent here, but
Blitz is the British auteur's first misstep.
Blitz is on Apple TV+ from
November 22nd.
