The formula is straightforward: A war movie filmed from the home front that attempts to stuff the entirety of a war into 180 minutes, resulting in a telling-over-showing product that hemorrhages cliché. Steve McQueen’s (“12 Years A Slave”) “Blitz,” set in London during World War II, tells the story of a young, single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan, “Lady Bird”), and her 9-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan, Debut), a mixed-race boy with Grenadian and English heritage. The action begins when George is sent to the countryside to protect him from German bombardments. From there, the film primarily follows George’s attempt to reunite with his mother in London while learning to redefine himself in the context of war. A secondary storyline concerns Rita’s involvement with the war effort from the home front.
There are several brilliant scenes where the accusation of telling-over-showing doesn’t apply. A flashback to the relationship between George’s father and Rita tracks through a Black jazz nightclub. It’s a perfect, wordless portrayal of a resounding theme in the film — in England, Blackness is associated with culture, but not “polite” culture. It’s brilliant, it’s exciting, it’s innovative, but it belongs to the night, and its interactions with white England are limited, filtered through hired performers, or kept “secret,” posing a problem for George’s visible mixed identity in an all-white neighborhood. In another scene, George is in a London arcade, eyes roaming the storefront displays. He reaches a section of edible goods, and notices exoticized racial caricatures — they are the first representations of other Black people the audience sees in George’s world. But when George speaks about Africa with an African national for the first time, he asks about the danger of African animals. When he instead learns that the real danger for many Africans, like in London, are things like traffic, Africa becomes peopled.
What’s unique about these scenes is that they breathe. They don’t need anything more than relaxed conversation. They contrast the speed and constant flux of new characters in much of the film — again, telling, not showing. The film has a frustrating mastery of these scenes, frustrating in how it quickly eschews itself and fumbles this pacing at nearly every opportunity it has.
More common are scenes like the last conversations George has with Ife (Benjamin Clementine, “Dune”), a Nigerian air raid warden who helps George on his journey to find his mother. Ife’s character, who initially represents a total upset to George’s understanding of his own racial identity, ultimately narrows into a mayfly guide, disappearing nearly as soon as he appears. The dynamic between George and Ife is without a doubt the most rich in the film, or at least held the most potential — “Blitz” quickly dwindles in interest after their scenes. Ife may be the first Black man George has interacted with at length, and certainly the first to speak with him about race and prompt reflection deeper than what seems to be self-avoidance. It’s unsatisfying that their dynamic is eventually reduced to easy conclusions (perhaps to satisfy an imagined moviegoing public or critic) and separation. This pattern — the abrupt meeting of a new character and the neat “finishing” of the relationship — remains consistent throughout the film. While it may have been intended to show the fluctuating nature of life during wartime, the characters come across as simplistic and one-dimensional.
It’s a fine movie. It’s a good movie, even; every audience member will be invested in George and his mother’s well-being. It “does its job,” if we have to reduce a film to that sentiment. But it’s not great. The consequences are predictable. It veers into cartoonishness in the second half, with characters soliloquizing and articulating themselves using oddly modern language. The script and the projected politics of the modern day onto the period are palpable. Outside of the words of the script, the film proves itself, as previously mentioned, entirely capable of articulating itself without the clunky dialogue. The fault is simply in the runtime and the scope of the film. Two hours might be enough to cover the relationship between George’s father and Rita, or George and Ife. Yet each of the small adventures that George partakes in, rather than giving the effect of a broad portrait of the life of a young boy reckoning with his racial identity during wartime, instead feels sloppy, unfinished, mildly overproduced and ultimately unsatisfying as an exploration of either idea. In doing so, the film wholly forgets George and Rita in conversation. The effect is doubled when intercut with Rita’s comparatively flat B-plot serving to show the “good” and “united”’ England of the period.
“Blitz” also shows its audience war through a child’s lens; one can’t watch the film without thinking of the same bombings happening today in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and countless places across the globe. How many children are subjected to exposure to the elements, hunger and separation from their parents despite or because of the most careful efforts to preserve their lives? How many are killed, buried under rubble and become like the plaster-coated dead who populate the film? “Blitz” is a period piece, but its public won’t recognize it as a story of the past.
It’s regrettable that “Blitz’s” two-hour runtime tries to cover so much; squaring England’s noble position in World War II and the solidarity of the home front with English racism and colonialism. In its attempt to appeal to both critics and an imagined older bourgeois public, “Blitz” tries to hold everything — to show it to you as quickly and simply as possible — but ends up dropping most of it.
Daily Arts Writer Max Johnson can be reached at nataljo@umich.edu.
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