“BLITZ” My rating: B (Apple +)
120 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Early in Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” a single London mother tries to convince her reluctant son that he must board a train filled with other children to spend months — even years — in the countryside, safe from the nightly rain of German bombs.
It will be, she cajoles, “an adventure for children only.”
She doesn’t know the half of it.
Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old George (Elliott Hefferman) share a home with her father, the piano playing Gerald (Paul Weller). They’re a tight bunch, which helps explain George’s dismay and ultimate fury at leaving his familiar streets and being shipped off to God knows where.
So at the first opportunity he leaps off the train and heads back to the city, encountering along the way a regular Pilgrim’s Progress of characters good and bad and more than a few close calls with mortality.
“Blitz” is several things at once, not all of them coexisting comfortably.
It begins with a hair-raising sequence showing civil defense crews fighting the fires caused by the bombing. There’s a visceral oomph to the moments depicting the air raids and the citizenry’s desperate search for shelter.
George’s adventures on the road are, well, remarkable. More happens to this kid in a few days than the rest of us experience in a lifetime.
Sneaking aboard a freight train he shares a few giddy thrills with three brothers who, rather than being farmed out to different families, have gone rogue.
Once in London —basically he’s lost — George finds himself hijacked by a Fagin-inspired crook (Stephen Graham) who uses him to steal valuables from bombed buildings and off dead folk. Very Dickensian.
Hr’d befriended by a civil defense guard (Benjamin Clementine) and spends a couple of nights crammed into a tube station with hundreds of other Londoners. On one of these occasions the tunnels are flooded with Thames water, creating a deathtrap.
Flooded tube station in “Blitz”
Here’s something I haven’t yet mentioned. George’s father was a black man deported years earlier. And his very blackness makes the boy’s journey all the more problematic,
Writer/director McQueen, of course, is a black Brit, and his resume is peppered with titles that delve deeply into the black experience (“12 Years a Slave” and the TV series “Small Axe” in particular). And in fact he was inspired to write “Blitz” after finding a vintage photo of a young black child with suitcase en route to the provinces.
So in addition to just staying alive, young George encounters numerous displays of racial intolerance.
But that’s only half the movie. Meanwhile Rita and her all-female fellow workers at the munitions plant must deal with the chauvinism of the management and unfair treatment. They are particularly incensed that the government has blocked the desperate public from using certain underground shelters. (There’s no explanation of what this is all about…makes one wonder if it was trimmed from the final cut.)
Eventually Rita gets word of George’s disappearance and goes on her own frantic search of London, abetted by a neighbor and civil defense warden (Harris Dickerson) who is quietly yearning for her.
And I haven’t even addressed the extensive flashbacks of Rita’s pre-war romance with Marcus (CJ Beckford) and the inevitable racial fallout from that taboo relationship.
Whew. That’s a lot of plot. Too much, in fact.
The performances are good, the physical production impressive, the handling of individual scenes generally tight and effective.
But there’s just so much going on that I practically succumbed to eye-rolling. More is not always better.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 