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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘BLITZ’ REVIEW: LOVE IN THE RUINS  
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Alissa Wilkinson
October 31, 2024
The New York Times
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_ McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely
seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among
Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces
when people are just trying to survive. _

The Blitz - London in October 1940, IMW

 

World War II is almost certainly the big screen’s most immortalized
conflict, and for good reason. It broke just as cinema was beginning
to mature as a form of entertainment, and footage from the front
narrated by peppy tales of victory was part of many people’s
moviegoing experience. What’s more, though, the outlines of World
War II could be boiled down to clean tales of good versus evil,
bravery versus cruelty — the sort of stories that make good two-hour
feature films.

As the historian Elizabeth Samet argues in her excellent 2021
book “Looking for the Good War,”
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heroism performed in Hollywood’s World War II movies soon became the
filter through which all American involvement in foreign wars was seen
and encouraged. In the aftermath of war, she writes, “causes are
retrofitted,” and “participants fondly recall heroic gestures.”
The tendency extends far beyond America, because the tale of valor
richly rewarded and goodness winning the day is the kind of World War
II movie we want to see — and the kind we mostly have.

Yet most stories during the war didn’t end in glory and goodness.
They ended in death and dismemberment, heartache and trauma, lives
destroyed, families ripped apart. Yes, the good guys won. But winning
a war still means losing.

The British film industry is hardly immune to the triumphalist tales,
and watching “Blitz,” I began to have a strong suspicion that
those are precisely the movie’s target. The filmmaker Steve McQueen,
whose film “12 Years a Slave”
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the Oscar for best picture in 2014, works with the eye of a protesting
artist, as aware of form as he is of content.

In his 2018 film “Widows,”
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women pulling off a heist, the form is that of a crime thriller. But
the real subject is the class and economic contradictions of Chicago,
which McQueen paints into the background except in one subtle,
unforgettable scene: As characters have a conversation of some note in
a car, the camera stays resolutely pointed out through the windshield,
and we watch the setting starkly change from run-down projects to
exquisite mansions in a matter of minutes. It’s a gutting
accompaniment to the machinations of power being discussed in the car.
You can’t really take one without the other.

The point of a McQueen film, in other words, is often dancing around
the edges of the frame, like a star twinkling in peripheral view. You
need to let your eyes lose focus for a second to catch it.

If you look directly at “Blitz,” the story is fairly
straightforward. It is 1940, a year into the war. Rita (Saoirse
Ronan), a single mother working in munitions, lives in a shabby London
neighborhood with her 9-year-old son, George (the astounding newcomer
Elliott Heffernan), whose father was a Grenadian immigrant, and her
father, Gerald (played by the musician Paul Weller). Like hundreds of
thousands of other children, George is about to board a train for the
British countryside to be protected from bombs. It’s the Blitz, and
London is under siege.

But things go awry almost from the start. George is livid to be
separated from Rita, who is gutted to be sending him away. He tells
her he hates her at the station, a bit of childish petulance that
nonetheless wounds them both. Then, a bit outside of London, he
decides he’s had enough of this, and he jumps off the train.

What follows is a series of adventures that grow more and more
harrowing as the story goes on. George makes his way back to London,
running into a set of siblings who are also running away. He meets a
kind police officer named Ife (the singer Benjamin Clementine) who
senses that this boy needs someone to watch out for him and get him
home. He glimpses the underground bunkers into which Londoners have
crowded for safety. He bumps into another helpful woman (Mica
Ricketts) who hands him over to a band of thieves run by Beryl and
Albert (Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham). At the same time Rita,
desperate to find her son once she discovers he is lost, is forced to
search amid the embattled city, with a little help from an old friend
named Jack who’s now a soldier (Harris Dickinson).

The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and
for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there
is something else going on narratively here. For one,  McQueen makes
a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of
this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging
sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just
trying to survive. George is the target of relentless insults from
other children, shopkeepers and random people on the street. Ife is as
well, despite his uniform. That the ugliness of prejudice and
xenophobia appears even among those who proudly consider themselves
opponents of Hitler’s murderous policies flags a deep contradiction
and capacity for self-deception in the human heart.

But the episodic nature of “Blitz” has another meaning. Opening
text of the film somberly explains that during the bombings, 1.25
million people left London, and more than half of them were children.
Thus primed to assume this is a story about evacuating, we’re a bit
surprised when George jumps from the train and heads back to London.

In fact, this pattern repeats throughout the film: George seems to be
beginning a story — the boy and the orphan brothers; the boy and the
kind mentor; the boy and the thieves; the boy hiding from the police
in the ruins — but it’s always finished almost before it begins.
Each story is aborted before it gets going.

And it’s not just George’s stories, either. In one remarkable
sequence
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a group of revelers are in an underground jazz club where an all-Black
band performs for a mostly white crowd. They’re laughing and dancing
and drinking, but then the planes are heard overhead, and their story
abruptly ends.

This sort of start-and-stop can feel a little frustrating, like
listening to a D.J. who keeps skipping to the next track just as the
beat really drops. But it’s clearly purposeful — as is the fact
that the pivotal act of heroism in the film is maddeningly,
brilliantly kept out of frame entirely. Often the camera (Yorick Le
Saux is the cinematographer) pulls back to overhead shots of London,
gradually turning to rubble night after night. This is, it suggests,
the real story.

Taken all together, the idea emerges. We tell ourselves stories of
wartime heroism, of resilient unity in the face of destruction, of the
power of the human spirit for a clear reason: We want to raise our
spirits and inspire ourselves to great things.

But the truth about history is always more complicated. People are
prejudiced and cruel, even people who believe they’re on the side of
the good. Stories do not always fit the narrative arcs we want for
them. And even heroes — especially heroes — find themselves,
sometimes, just weeping in the ruins.

"BLITZ" IS SCREENING IN THEATERS CURRENTLY AND WILL STREAM ON APPLE TV
NOVEMBER 22ND.

* Film
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* Film Review
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* 'Blitz'
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* Steve McQueen
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* WWII
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* Racism
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