“Blitz” is writer-director Steve McQueen’s wartime survival drama, consistently tense and persistently string-pulling. It relays a story of London in 1940 under attack, with a protagonist that never would’ve had the chance to center a screen narrative when McQueen was growing up. Some of the images evoke a harrowing chunk of history in intimately observed ways.
These moments are grand, as is McQueen’s skill across many genres. Much of “Blitz,” however, settles for immaculate grandiosity, which is a surprise coming from a director whose “12 Years a Slave” (2013) and the five-part anthology “Small Axe” (2020), very different achievements, were my favorites of their respective years. We meet 9-year-old George, played by Elliott Heffernan, in a cocoon of relative safety.
He and his mother Rita, a munitions factory worker and sometime singer portrayed by Saoirse Ronan, live with George’s granddad (Paul Weller) in their east London Stepney flat. Rita is white; biracial George, who never knew his father (the film reveals why in due course), has known his unfair share of prejudice, tempered by a home filled with support and love. The German Luftwaffe bombing raids, which ultimately killed more than 40,000 English civilians, led many families to send their children to the countryside, away from London.
McQueen’s screenplay does likewise, starting in London, traveling away and then back again. Early on, a deeply conflicted Rita sees her scared, angry son off a.
