A wartime twist on Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Blitz follows not a young runaway struggling to survive on the streets of 1830s London, but a boy (Elliott Heffernan) sent to the English countryside during World War II who tries to make his way back to his mother (Saoirse Ronan) as German bombs fall on the capital city. Writer-director Steve McQueen isn’t sly about his inspiration—there’s a grim section where a Fagin-like character (Stephen Graham) forces George, the boy, to squeeze into bombed-out buildings and steal jewelry from corpses—but this is more than a literary riff. Considering George’s biracial identity, Blitz becomes—like McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series—a stirring argument that the Black experience deserves a place in British history. (At one point, George wanders amidst candy-store windows, enticed by the treats but alarmed by the racist caricatures of enslaved workers harvesting sugarcane in the colonies.) Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery, including an early, seemingly impressionistic shot of flickering streaks of light against a dark blue background. Later, during the movie’s climax, we return to the image and the camera pulls back to reveal its terrifying real-world source. Leave it to McQueen to capture real-world experience with abstract art.
(10/25/2024)
