I first saw a Steve McQueen film about 10 or so years ago. I remember it today. On October 18th, 2013 I first saw 12 Years a Slave. When I walked out of the theater that night I instantly knew that movie was going to be a best picture, director, & actor contender come awards season. Of course, Lupita Nyong’o winning Best Supporting Actress was a bonus, but she’s proved to be a great actress besides that. McQueen though has been on my radar ever since. He’s a director and when I hear he’s got a new movie coming out I get very excited. The same goes for his latest Blitz. It’s been on my mind ever since I heard it screened at TIFF last year. It has lived up to my expectations. 

Blitz as the title refers to is about the German Blitzkrieg that occurred during WWII in England, specifically London.  The main focus is a single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) who has a mixed-race boy named George (Elliot Hefferman). She is a hard-working woman at an ammunition factory during the war and for her son’s safety, she decides to send him away. Along the journey George gets homesick and resentful of something, he said to his mom before she sent him away, so he decides to jump off the train and go back to her. Along the way, he meets some colorful characters. While that’s happening his mother is navigating the world around her without her son. 

McQueen doesn’t leave much to the imagination in his latest film. The Blitzkrieg if you will, is very destructive and dangerous to all the citizens of London and the surrounding areas. People are hiding in subway tunnels and various underground areas to protect themselves and their families. Scenes of blown-up buildings and dead bodies are very prevalent during the course of the movie. I was taken aback by a few scenes where people were sitting in their homes having a cup of tea or sweeping some of the rubble out of their living rooms as the roofs were completely blown off. They couldn’t come to realize they didn’t have a home anymore and it was past time they had to evacuate the premises.  It was a stark realization that war takes no prisoners. Everyone’s a victim of war.

Saoirse Ronan is having a good year with her starring performance in The Outrun and her Supporting performance here in Blitz. I’ve been a fan of hers ever since I saw her in Atonement in 2007. She’s proved to be one of the best actresses around ever since that point. She started in roles as a third or teenager, but now she’s risen to the point where she’s playing a young mother. That’s a big step for her in her career. As this mother she has some emotional moments, especially when she finds out her son has been lost and he’s not in the safe hands of the authorities anymore. Like any mother, of course, she is distraught about the thought of her son being missing and possibly dead. She is fantastic as this mother figure. She’s good enough to get a Best Supporting Actress nomination come awards season, but regional critics groups have to push her for this and an overdue narrative.

Elliot Hefferman is a young British actor who is starring in his first acting role ever in Blitz. After a nationwide search, he got a chance to try out for this role. He went through a long and arduous audition process and has come through it with flying colors. He’s fantastic in this role. He commands the screen in every scene he’s in. More often than not he’s mad, at his mom, and reclusive because he doesn’t know his surroundings or trust the people he meets, but he’s very good in the role anyway. He goes through a lot in this performance and I was rooting for him in every scene he was in. McQueen got everything he could out of this young man and I can’t wait to see him in more roles in the future. He was terrific in this film.

Along with Hefferman and Ronan, there is a decent supporting cast in this movie. Harris Dickenson plays Jack, a helpful constable, a police officer during those days, he tries to be friends and help Ronan’s character during a difficult time. Stephen Graham plays Albert, a shady thief who steals from the recently deceased. Hefferman’s character comes across him and his crew during his search for his mother. Another helpful police officer is Ife played by Benjamin Clementine. He is the only genuine person Hefferman’s character comes across in his travels. Along with Erin Kellyman, Leigh Gil, and many others in this film, the cast is stellar, and all serve a good purpose. I enjoyed quite a few of the supporting characters in the movie.

With any film dealing with war or a period piece, it’s going to have a lot of CGI and or production design. Blitz has a lot of both of these. There are a few sprawling shots of the destroyed London to give perspective on how destructive the Blitzkrieg was on this great city. Close-up shots showed more of the first-person perspective on streets and homes people lived in. These techniques gave the film a darker and more realistic look at how horrible these events were on the English people. No matter what race, region, or creed they were. The Blitzkrieg affected everybody equally and killed indiscriminately. 

A couple of years ago McQueen made a series of short films called Small Ax, about the island experience of immigrants from various island nations such as Jamaica who are under the banner of Great Britain. This film feels like a Small Ax adjacent to me. Where there are multiple characters who could translate into those stories. This is just such a bigger story so he did an entire full-length movie on the subject instead of a short film. All these stories tie together in a way, but this one is much bigger in feel and scope all the way around. I think it was smart to go in this direction as a writer/director. The film and viewers benefit from that decision in the end.

Blitz shows a different side to WWII that a lot of filmgoers haven’t seen. Sure a lot of different stories have been told about WWII over the years, but this specific one which is fictionalized by McQueen still shows a quite harrowing and destructive story. McQueen wrote the screenplay with a specific subtext of racial unrest in England at this time,  but it also has to capture the overall effect that the Blitzkrieg had on this country and city. He achieved that goal in my mind. I was completely engrossed in the story. Even though this story may have a happy ending there was no happy ending until the war was over and Hitler and the Nazis were defeated by the Allied Forces. He made his point in the script. 

Blitz is an amazing look at something rarely seen in WWII films. The German Blitzkrieg was a devastating thing all the way around. No matter what perspective you look at it from. Everybody who lived in and around London, England at this difficult time was affected by this. Nobody no matter what race, creed, or religion was spared from the death toll. The intimate story of a boy trying to find his mother who he misses is quite emotional.  The performances from both Hefferman and Ronan are very good. The supporting cast is also pretty good. The technical aspects left a little to be desired but I got the picture of what McQueen and company were going for. This was a really good movie in McQueen’s filmography,  but it wasn’t his best. I could tell it was a personal story he wanted to tell though.

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen