OSCAR-winning writer/director Steve McQueen recreates Second World War-era London for a compelling family-friendly story centred on the misadventures an 11-year-old evacuee who absconds from a countryside-bound train in an attempt to get home to mum.
Star of the show is first-time actor Elliot Heffernan, making a startlingly assured big screen debut as the plucky young George, whose determination not to be separated from his doting mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and kindly, piano-playing grandad (a surprisingly good turn by music star Paul Weller) back in London’s East End drives the plot at hand.
Star of the show is first-time actor Elliot Heffernan, making a startlingly assured big screen debut as the plucky young George
Having barely ventured out of his native Stepney prior to being dispatched to greener pastures with a trainload of fellow reluctant evacuees, George has his work cut out for him once he decides to leap from the speeding locomotive taking him far beyond the nightly bombing runs of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
Meanwhile, Rita and her mates Doris (Erin Kellyman) and Tilda (Hayley Squires, essentially the woman from the iconic ‘We Can Do It!’ posters made flesh) are hard at work in a London munitions factory helping to make the British bombs destined to destroy German cities.
These scenes are quite playful in tone: there are comedic moments with a pompous, busy-body factory manager (Jean-Pascal Heynemand) and we also see the musically-talented Rita overcoming nerves to sing for a visiting BBC Radio team doing a live broadcast.
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However McQueen deftly counterbalances such jolly/heart-warming japes with a deliciously subversive moment to remind us of the superficially mundane factory’s deadly purpose: one sequence tracking a bomb’s progress down the assembly line utilises a tension-ramping music cue from scoremeister Hans Zimmer that pointedly echoes the pulse-racing soundtrack to countless life-or-death action sequences from more ‘traditional’ war movies of the past.
Blitz cuts back and forth between following George and Rita, the former becoming increasingly frightened as he attempts to negotiate unfamiliar areas of London, the latter growing ever more frantic over her missing son’s whereabouts even as she helps out in a makeshift public bomb shelter - these scenes inspired by the real life East End operation run by Jewish activist Mickey Davis (portrayed by Leigh Gill).
While there’s almost a children’s adventure film feel to some of George’s storyline, particularly early on when he’s riding the rails with a trio of fellow young evacuee absentees, real danger is never far away, whether from the perils of traversing live railway tracks unaccompanied or putting your trust in strangers.
Some are genuinely helpful, like kindly Air Raid Precautions warden Ize (Benjamin Clementine) who shares stories of his Nigerian heritage and demonstrates how to stand up to the racists beginning to seethe among wartime London’s already multicultural populace, thus helping George to embrace the ‘black’ side of his mixed-race identity - something we learn more about via flashback in Rita’s storyline.
However, eventually the child falls foul of a grimy East End street gang led by the Fagin-like Albert (Stephen Graham) and his terrifying mother, Beryl (Kathy Burke).
And, when the bombs do fall on London, McQueen doesn’t shy away from the horrific aftermath, notably in one scene based on the real life destruction of the famous Cafe de Paris in Leicester Square, struck by a 50kg Nazi bomb during a concert in 1941.
McQueen delights in bringing to life the big band jazz-soundtracked glitz, glamour and queer-friendly revelry of the club via an extended, colourfully staged musical sequence. Poignantly, band and audience are freeze-framed a split-second prior to the inevitable explosion: we then skip to the still smouldering rubble, peppered with tables of dusty, fully intact corpses being looted for their valuables by Alfred and co.
While there’s no doubt Blitz is very much Heffernan’s film, the adult cast are all on form as well, particularly Ronan, who is as utterly convincing as ever as George’s increasingly fraught and guilt-riddled mother.
It may not be as heavy-hitting as the likes of Hunger and 12 Years A Slave, but Blitz is still a masterfully spun tale which should hit home with a broader, 12A-certificate abiding family audience.
It packs plenty of emotional thump, and as McQueen steadily ramps up the tension - including a prolonged action set-piece involving a flooded Underground station - audiences will be on tenterhooks as to whether they will actually get the tearful mother/son reunion they are hoping for.
