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Blitz Is the Worst Movie Steve McQueen Has Made
By any wider standard, that means that the World War II drama is still not bad at all.
But even that’s more a tendency than the unifying quality for a director who went from a chilly portrait of a sex addict in Shame to a devastating depicting of slavery in 12 Years a Slave, and from there to the sinewy heist movie Widows and then to Small Axe, a kaleidoscopic anthology series about London’s West Indian community. Blitz, his latest, is a sentimental journey through London in 1940, following a boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) as he runs away from the train transporting him and other children evacuated to the countryside and heads back to the ravaged city to reunite with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan, giving her all in an odd role that leans on her supporting character more than is warranted). In centering Blitz on a mixed-race child thrown alone into the chaos of a war-torn country, McQueen aims to both poke holes in propagandistic representations of this period as one of uniform “keep calm and carry on” solidarity and expand the image of a patriotic British identity to include kindly Nigerian ARP wardens, devoted Jewish community leaders, and, eventually, George himself as the unexpected hero of a hair-raising disaster involving an underground station.
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