Under Adolf Hitler, Germany has tossed London into chaos during a relentless nighttime bombing campaign: the Blitzkrieg.  With the men away fighting the war, women like Rita (Saoirse Ronan) work the factories which were converted to making ammunition and bombs of their own.  A single mother, she and her young son George (Elliott Heffernan) live with her father, Gerald (Paul Weller).  To help protect the children, the British Government sets up safety zones that they can be shuttled to by rail.  Distraught at saying goodbye to George, Rita begins to assist in the local underground shelters; and George, distraught about being sent away from his family, makes a daring jump from the train and is determined to find his way back home. 

Steve McQueen delivered Blitz, a WWII drama he wrote and directed, to the BFI London Film Festival, opting to debut the work at a more locally specific venue than some of the other more prestigious European festivals.  The 120-minute drama will play at its widest as part of Apple TV+, but the studio has its eyes on awards season, opting to distribute the film themselves ahead of its streaming bow.  Details and grosses are hard figures to find for the title stateside, but it most likely followed a limited release as in the UK. The tech giant opted for only 200 screens; enough to build buzz though not enough to generate any new $9.99/month subscriptions. 

Blitz is framed initially as a close, family story in the face of war, but as the narrative begins to bloom, it takes on a wider, more kaleidoscopic structure, especially when George is leading the story forward.  It is not necessarily fair to judge a film on what the viewer wants it to be as opposed to what the filmmaker presented, but to steer this narrative into an almost fractured experience is a bold choice that unfortunately holds the characters back while McQueen enjoys the narrative freedom on the page.  The biggest victim of this is Ronan – dressed by Jacqueline Durran and styled by Melissa van Tongeren in such a way that she seems a spitting image of Cate Blanchett – but she still delivers the star power to help open Apple’s pocketbooks and peak audience’s curiosity, though, Blitz is more arguably in first-time actor Heffernan’s hands.   

The film finally begins to take shape, albeit one of a revolving door, in the second act after George jumps from the train and works his way in and out of various situations and meeting different people across one boy’s almost fantastical journey through war-torn England.  In conjunction with Yorick Le Saux’s camera work and Peter Sciberras’ editing, Blitz takes on an almost Spielbergian sense of wonder, though it is devoid of that same sentimentality that allows McQueen’s work to stand on its own.  It is all right there, the lovingly colored images of the past, a runaway boy on an adventure, meeting a ragtag group of youths on a train, and daring each other to climb to the top of the train car, inspiring his new companions to follow his lead.  To be reductive, the latent DNA of Empire of the Sun (1987) and War Horse (2011) is not difficult to trace back, but McQueen does not try to shield audiences from the violence and the horrors of war, nor does he present anything too obscene for its PG-13 rating.  With a twinge of ambiguity, he delivers the first shocking chapter break as the boys depart the train while it undergoes inspection at a station, and while other trains come racing in across the yard, and police are on the prowl, McQueen keeps the camera far away so that we never leave the station with an accurate headcount. 

Moreso than war, Blitz is examining elements of race and racial prejudice that, while backdropped by events some eighty years ago, the themes and individual character interactions with the las and society at large can still seem as timely as ever.  There are some general scenes played out in flashback of George playing with the kids on his street as they hurl slurs at him both behind his back and to his face.  It is cruel, and McQueen does not need to belabor the point, especially working with such a young actor, but he does not spare Ronan’s Rita that same courtesy.  Her flashback returns to a date at a pub with Marcus (CJ Beckford).  On their way home, they get into a scuffle and the police pull Marcus in for questioning after the brawl.  Le Saux’s camera is in the middle of the action, cutting away only to capture close to Ronan’s face as she screams helplessly to stop the brutality.  McQueen’s script is rather sparse when it comes to Rita’s story, focusing more on George, but in this scene especially in how it is never returned to or resolved really creates a narrative imbalance.  Thankfully, though, Blitz spends much of its time with George and Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a kind policeman originally from Nigeria.  As he takes George under his wing, slowly but surely the boy begins to open up to the officer culminating in a quiet, yet powerful moment, where George accepts his blackness to Ife. 

This pair, like so many before it, eventually passes and George finds himself in a rapscallion gang that gets by from looting the bombed-out business the morning after and lifting the jewels off of the casualties.  The character design and inspiration feel like something out of Les Misérables, but without the music, yet there still seems to be some effort to inject some humor into the narrative through these “masters of the house” giving this whole sequence of George’s story a very disjointed feel.  While the tone changes drastically in a way that does not necessarily serve the film, the fear in Heffernan’s performance intensifies, in no greater scene than when he is forced into a collapsing jewelry store to lift the items left behind.  We have already felt a supreme betrayal moments before when Jess (Mica Ricketts), a seemingly friendly passerby who offers the boy some food turns him into the underworld gang – proof of McQueen’s calculated precision on the page and in the direction when he chooses to be concise – and now with the cops closing in on the boy and memories of how his father was treated by law enforcement, this becomes one of the more harrowing scenes of the entire film and there is an undeniable sigh of relief when he scurries through an exit. 

There is a dreamlike realism present through the duration of Blitz, oftentimes returning to distorted shots of the shadows of planes over the waves to demarcate the changing of the day into night, or to black and white images of poppies in the breeze as if shot from an anachronistic home video camera.  Late in the film, there is another moment where McQueen, despite sprinkling these tidbits of fantasy across the narrative, deceives us once again, and most tragically as it directly affects the plot we are witnessing.  George awakes in the subway, tiptoeing around the others sleeping on the tracks, heading towards the tunnel, and emerging at Stepny station.  Home at last.  And then the boy awakes for real, a puddle forming in the ground which he has bedded down for the night, moments before the subway floods.  We are still reeling from the stinging realization as this is the first time McQueen has used this almost whimsical atmosphere as a weapon against us, presenting us with a stark falsity on screen and then using it as a springboard for a sequence so incredible that it bends our credulity simply because we are now watching the rest of the events unfold with a little less trust in what we are seeing. 

Blitz is at its best when it is an untethered experience as McQueen is able to let the imagery speak for itself and when the story is at its most transient. The greatest example of this is when George is walking through the mall after curfew, and in the windows of the candy shop his eyes slowly begin to focus on the frescos that back the display cabinets depicting black men working the fields harvesting the cocoa beans; details that will be overlooked by the white, upperclass as they purchase their luxury chocolates. When it adheres to the more mosaic structure – think something like Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia (1999) but here it is the war that is the connecting thread between these characters that are all experiencing it in vastly different ways – McQueen is able to highlight what brings us together in times where things are being torn apart. There is an imbalance, though, that holds the film back as we see a community that is mourning and thriving running parallel to a poignant coming-of-age story of a young, bi-racial boy. Because it is all being guided by McQueen, both stories are engaging and wonderfully assembled, but even though it follows a relationship between a mother and son, the two stories clash like oil and water on the screen. Blitz becomes an unspecified biopic about a large topic that is then synthesized down to a single family, becoming too big and too small all at once to deliver the story to its audience in the strongest way possible.