Blitz: Steve McQueen’s Epic Drama Reveals Human Stories Beneath the Rubble
By John Kirk
Rating: A
Being the son of parents who both served in the British military - and the grandson and great-grandson who broke my family’s chain of military service - I naturally grew up with stories of human perseverance in the Second World War.
It was driven home to me that it wasn’t just the soldiers who fought, but also civilians who suffered and resisted in the face of the greatest human conflict in the history of written civilization.
Steve McQueen’s epic drama Blitz evokes that message.
The story: in 1940 London, nine-year old George (Elliott Heffernan) must be evacuated to the countryside for safety. Hitler believes that targeting civilian populations will break the British spirit, and London and other major cities in the British Isles face nightly bombing attacks and a level of devastation against non-combatants that had never been seen in history to this date.
A mother (Saoirse Ronan) sends her boy (Elliot Heffernan) away to escape the bombing.
His mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan) makes the emotionally difficult decision to send her boy to safer areas in Britain. Packed with a sandwich for the trip, some belongings and clothing in a suitcase, he is labeled and loaded on to a train with hundreds of thousands of other children. He defiantly resists and jumps the train at the nearest occasion, determined to return home. In the ensuing return to his neighbourhood, he encounters disparate people, experiences an array of wild adventures and experiences the London Blitz in a way that seldom, if ever, has been presented onscreen before.
It’s a powerfully emotional story built on a foundation of surprising historical accuracy. This film treats us to a cross-section of the civilian experience of World War II that isn’t typically thought about. The detail is surprisingly accurate as well, when we consider the make-up of the population, the nature of the dangers civilians faced in the crumbling, decimated city along with the nature of people who were forced to survive in these circumstances. For anyone interested in the history of World War II, this is a textbook look at life in 1940 London.
On his return home, George encounters fellow children evacuees caught up in the hurly-burly of being crammed onto trains by the Department of Education personnel, but also like-minded children who have the same aim as him: to return to their families.
He also encounters unsavoury criminal elements that impart a somewhat Dickensian touch to the story. And he is privileged to encounter nobility and heroism in the form of a friendly air-raid warden while also seeing the failures of the civic government to properly protect its population by opening up all the London Underground stations for sheltering.
George even gets to be a hero by contributing to the salvation of some of his fellow city-dwellers. This presents to the audience that, despite the over-reaching umbrella of the historical significance of the Blitz, people come in all sorts of types, especially as they struggle to survive.
A very present feature of George’s interactions with these people is the prejudice he encounters. Being a bi-racial child in 1940’s England isn’t ideal. But George is witness to both the positive and negative sides of humanity, allowing him to understand his own identity in his travels. It’s an unexpected perspective in this historical film that makes it all the more authentic. After all, regardless of what time frame, people are ultimately people. Do we not all bleed?
Regardless of the individual natures of the different people George meets in his travels, the idea of survival and the resilience of the British people, notwithstanding their origins, comes through in this film. We see people of all backgrounds, representing the inexorable multicultural nature of the British Empire in the 1940s. These were also people who suffered and resisted during the Blitz, people from all parts of those nations who would live in London and become parts of those neighbourhoods.
Whether they were Jewish, Chinese, African, Caribbean, or Indian, the people who were subjugated by the colonialist ambitions of Britain also show themselves to be part of its salvation in this film. These people were also there, and not just the typical white Cockney family who raised their mug of tea in defiance to Hitler and his air armada. These people were also British.
This is a story of bravery. Whether it’s a nine-year old boy who makes the fateful decision to defy his mother and embark upon a perilous return home, or a city firefighter who tries to extinguish one of the many blazes from the bombings, we see humanity represented at its very best.
We see the women who worked in the factories but who also defied death by living their lives as well as supplying materiel for the war effort. We see the Underground rail conductors who had to make life or death decisions in opening up their stations for protection against the air-raids. In short, it’s a story of heroism at the level that it wouldn’t be perceived as heroism; simply people doing their jobs as best as they can, given the circumstances.
I listened to stories of my father-in-law lying in fields outside of the city, watching the Luftwaffe Bombers fly overhead to rain bombs upon their home. My mother would talk about the work that she did as a search-and-recue radio operator and my father talked about his first meeting with his soldier father after he returned from overseas service.
Blitz presents a family’s experience of the war as experienced by a child. We root for him as much as we would our own families and while you don’t need a family connection to the war brought to Britain, this film will provide a unique insight into that time and turn it into a relatable experience for everyone.
Blitz. Written and directed by Steve McQueen. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Elliot Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Paul Weller, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham, Leigh Gill ad C.J. Beckford. Opens in select theatres in Canada on Friday, November 8 and premieres on Apple TV+ November 22.