Review: ‘Blitz’ finds its grieving heart and a spirit that soars

Sir Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” now in theaters ahead of its Apple TV+ debut on Nov. 22, is an indisputably good movie. But from British writer-director McQueen, the first Black filmmaker to win a best picture Oscar (for 2013’s “12 Years a Slave”), we expect great things (see “Hunger,” “Shame” “Widows,” “Small Axe”). And though it tries mightily, “Blitz” misses the mark.
What a shame since all the elements are in place for something extraordinary. Set against the German bombings of London during WW2, “Blitz” is an epic with a core of intimacy involving a heart-piercing Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a distraught single mother trying to find her runaway, mixed-race, nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan, outstanding) amid the chaos of war.
“Blitz” starts with Rita, who works in a munitions factory and lives in London with George and her father, Gerald (a sublime turn from musician Paul Weller), arranging to evacuate her son far away from the constant air assaults. Other parents are also putting children by the thousands on trains into the safer countryside. but George resists vehemently. “I hate you,” he lies to Rita.
Before George is halfway to his destination, he bolts from the train, determined to walk back home to London. George’s escape is unknown at first to Rita. We see her on the factory floor singing a comfort tune for BBC radio called “Winter Coat,” written by McQueen and composer Nicholas Britell and well deserving of an Oscar attention in the best song category.
When she learns George is missing, Rita turns to Jack (Harris Dickinson), a police friend who yearns to be more than friends. But harrowing scenes of citizens nearly drowned in flooded bomb shelters leave no time for wartime romance or the cliches of the genre.
Ronan is a stirring screen presence, but the film belongs to young Heffernan who anchors every scene with raw emotion. George’s situation is dangerously fraught and allows McQueen to arrange his script in the Charles Dickens manner, like a series of misadventures.
Along the way, George tries to hold to the ground as the ground keeps shifting with bombs turning streets into rubble, images stunningly captured by Yorick Le Saux’s searching camera. We gaze in horror as George falls into the clutches of two Dickensian villains out of “Oliver Twist” (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke) who teach the boy to pick the pockets of the dead.
“Blitz” hits hardest when McQueen catches, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, the diversity of London often ignored in other films of the period. It’s impossible not to be angered and moved as George endures racist bullying. The boy never knew his father (CJ Beckford), a Grenadian- deported after a scuffle with white tormentors.
George finds a supportive surrogate father in Ife (Benjamin Clémentine, wonderful ), an air raid warden and Nigerian immigrant whose situation speaks to the toxic anti-immigrant bias still coursing through present-day war zones, personal and global.
Even as McQueen overcrowds his two-hour film with social issues and teaching moments, “Blitz” locates its moral center by seeing war through the eyes of a biracial child forced to grow up too fast. In these scenes, undiluted by sentiment, sermonizing and clumsy contrivance, “Blitz” finds its grieving heart and a spirit that soars.