The cinema of suffering need not necessarily be a traumatic experience. In the 16 years since his first feature, Hunger, Steve McQueen has proved himself to be one of contemporary cinema’s premier chroniclers of pain. With colonial occupation, addiction, slavery, grief and death all explored in intimate detail across his features. But he’s explored them with compassion, and always with some measure of hope. If not that this pain will have been worth something then that it can, and often does, end.
After last year’s Occupied City, about the lives of Amsterdam’s residents during Nazi occupation in World War II, McQueen returns to Northern Europe in the 1940s with Blitz. The story of a nine-year-old boy, George (Elliott Heffernan), separated from his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), after being evacuated from London and promptly absconding. War, of course, is a panorama of pain. In Blitz, it is neither the pain of grief nor death, though those elements do appear. It is the pain of separation – George feels it the moment his departure is imminent. And his mother feels it most acutely when news of his disappearance from the train taking him away from London is announced to her.
And again, albeit in briefer, more abstract form than before, there is the pain of separation from one’s own culture. George’s father, a Black man, was deported to Grenada before his birth, and he suffers the same racial abuse as his father a decade later. His suffering is dealt in verbal insults. And compounded by visual reminders in shop window displays. Proudly flaunting the origin of the chocolate treats he eyes enviously in crude caricatures of Black figures. He can’t escape this pain, even in his most basic need and desire for food.
Yet the gruelling nature of McQueen’s trio of first features is absent from Blitz. Despite the gruelling nature of the story. If the desperate acts performed by protagonists of his previous movies were to right some egregious wrong, the wrong committed against George in Blitz is only a perceived one. And, through the traumas he endures on his trek back to his family, and through the anxiety Rita endures over the same period, McQueen focuses on common themes in movies about World War II: resilience and love.
Each character seeks out and swiftly discovers some means of alleviation for their personal difficulties, in companionship or, for Rita, in creating for herself a sense of usefulness. Their short but eventful journeys through their separation open up their little family unit. Showing us the variety of identities and experiences of London’s diverse population. From political organizers to volunteer wardens, from criminal gangs to ordinary citizens doing their best to survive another day under German bombing raids.
If this sounds remarkably conventional for a Steve McQueen movie, it’s because it is. Blitz rarely feels like a movie you wouldn’t recognize. And it frequently yields to dramatic clichés that only succeed in their purpose due to the sincerity and integrity of McQueen’s design. And that success is almost entirely commensurate with their novelty. When McQueen indulges wholeheartedly in cliché, Blitz loses the spark that elsewhere keeps it alive.
It becomes leaden and obvious, like in a frankly corny scene in a shelter where a lesson in racial tolerance is delivered with minimal subtlety. Or a few scenes in Rita’s workplace where McQueen’s inconsistent handle on credible dialogue is exposed. Still, his ability to shock and surprise is employed generously. Just when you think the movie’s in danger of slipping into sub-Spielbergian territory, he stages a sequence of terror or disaster that takes your breath away with its sheer force. McQueen is a smart and judicious stylist. He’s using that talent less and less with each narrative feature, but he’s far from given up on it yet.
It’s in the demonstrations of this talent that Blitz survives, in the end, as a worthwhile exploration of suffering. Albeit suffering filtered through a positive outlook, perhaps befitting the juvenile perspective of its protagonist. George is a mightily determined boy, and his age likely diminishes his capacity to process the horrors of what he both witnesses and withstands. His unrelenting drive to right the wrong of his separation from his mother overcomes all else. And even excuses all else, and it becomes the hope that has appeared so consistently yet so minimally in each of McQueen’s other features to date.
Blitz is suffused with hope, and it’s an authentic hope, and this is what itself excuses all else herein. McQueen may have stumbled a little here, but the large virtues of this movie overcome the little defects.
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