Blitz

I've always maintained that the cinema will never run out of fresh stories to tell about WWII, and the latest from Steve McQueen bears me out. The director of Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, and the Small Axe movies focuses his lens on a nine-year-old mixed-race English kid named George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) living in London during the Blitz. After his Black father was deported to Grenada, George remained in London with his white mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), and grandfather, Gerald (Paul Weller ). After the Nazi bombing starts to destroy the city, Gerald encourages Rita to evacuate George to the country with other children for his safety. He reluctantly boards the train but jumps off midway, determined to return to his mother.

The film follows a split narrative, with half of the time focused on George and the people he encounters as he tries to make his way home and the other half spent with Rita and seeing her life working in a munitions factory, singing on the radio, and flirting in a chaste way with her friend Jack (Harris Dickinson). Both stories are interesting, but the way the film is structured doesn't allow them much time to breathe and develop. Rita's story would seem to require far more time than the number of days allotted to it, while George's adventure feels somewhere between a truncated Dickens novel and a kid's version of Roman Polanski's The Pianist.

None of the supporting characters are developed into anything with real flesh and blood. Everyone feels like an idea, or an ideal, or the embodiment of type. Fortunately, the performances make these supporting roles engaging. By the movie's end, we don't so much feel as if we've gone on a journey with these characters so much as we've witnessed their personal account of an oft-dramatized time in history. There is value in seeing the personal account of a fictional character you've never seen before, but I must say, I had hoped for more from this movie than what it delivered.