Blitz Review: A Solid Saoirse Ronan but Steve McQueen’s WWII Story Feels Too Tidy
Anyone who grew up in Britain knows the story of Britain's unwavering fighting spirit during World War II. In schools, children were repeatedly drilled into the story of how the great British nation bravely maintained a united front. Women took over the jobs that men conscripted into the war could not do, families were encouraged to grow vegetable gardens for "victory", and more than a million people, most of them children, were evacuated from the vulnerable city. Perhaps the most enduring image is that of Londoners taking refuge in Underground stations during the German air raids known as the Blitz, can be streamed on Afdah. There was a sense of community, neighbors and strangers alike protecting each other and shielding them from the fires of hell. Despite all the horror and destruction, a strangely rosy picture of wartime Britain prevails. Nothing's better than the good old days, they say.
Steve McQueen's Blitz offers a fresh counterpoint to this nostalgia. Sure, there may have been community, but there just wasn't unconditional acceptance. You see it in the white couple who try to isolate themselves in a bomb shelter by pinning the sheets down with clothespins, in the cruel rejection of black volunteers who try to save them, and... the racism passed down from parent to child. Kids. So much for the allies. For viewers who grew up watching the titular attack, the film feels like a direct dialogue with the romanticized stories of hope and unity that permeated theaters and classrooms through word of mouth.
Similarly, the characters in Blitz are more archetypes than real people, the good Samaritan, the tragic friend. For the most part, the people George meets have ulterior motives, and are so repetitive that it's easy to predict when they'll turn against him. Rita has a slightly more optimistic perspective, as she works in a munitions factory by day in a Rosie the Riveter costume and volunteers at a friendly bomb shelter by night. McQueen once again plays off this disjunction between fond memories of the war and the dark reality as Rita and her coworkers discuss the destructive weapons they've been entrusted with. And when a BBC radio crew visited the factory, the women took to the microphone to advocate for the use of Tube stations as bomb shelters. Though workers who helped the war effort are now hailed as heroes, the Blitz showed how local communities were treated like disposable assets, vulnerable to air raids.
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