Blitz - Review Thread

A word that gets over-used in the film fan vocabulary is “Oscar bait.” It’s a word that gets used to designate a movie that is seemingly made for no reason other than to appeal to voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has employed tropes from other Oscar past nominees, seemingly in a cynical attempt to appeal to earn nominations. What I don’t like about how the term is used is that it frequently gets misapplied, often by people who don’t really understand what types of movies get Oscar nominations, to movies that clearly aren’t Oscar bait. It’s gotten to the point where it can become a sort of catch-all slur used to dismiss pretty much any movie someone doesn’t like which doesn’t have a Superhero in it. Maybe that’s a bit of a referendum on how narrow what constitutes a “commercial” movie these days has become but still, in order to identify true Oscar-bait you need to understand the exact brand of middle-brow sensibilities, fake importance, and easy uplift that this organization laps up. And make no mistake, real Oscar-bait does exist; Harvey Weinstein turned it into a science in the 90s and 2010s. I bring this up because, well, the new film from Steve McQueen (a filmmaker I don’t associate with awards bait generally) comes pretty close to being guilty of this label and I want to make it clear I don’t use this label lightly.

The film begins in London circa 1940 and looks at a woman named Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her mixed race son George (Elliott Heffernan), who are living in a small London house with her father Gerald (Paul Weller). It’s the height of “the blitz” and after experiencing a mad scramble for shelter during a bombing raid Rita decides to evacuate George out of London and into the countryside. The program can only accommodate the child though so George will need to be sent off on his own while Rita stays back and works at an armament factory. George is frustrated about this however and doesn’t want to go and this leads him to jump from the train mid journey and make his way back to London and while he is able to get there pretty fast by hopping a boxcar going in the other direction he quickly finds navigating back to his house more difficult than expected and goes on an odyssey that will involve encounters with Military Police, more bombing raids, and encounters with London gangsters. Meanwhile we also follow Rita as she learns about George’s non-arrival in the countryside and goes out trying to find her lost son.

It’s pretty apparent right from the outset that this is a much more conventional and kind of family friendly work than what we normally get from Steve McQueen, certainly a far cry from what we got out of Hunger. The main linkage I can spot with his earlier work I suppose is that he’s clearly someone who’s interested in history and with his mini-series “Small Axe” he displayed a particular passion for wading into the history of black people in England and this could in some ways be viewed as an extension of that given that it’s about a mixed race child in World War II London and occasionally encounters other members of the black population there. The film is not, however, terribly probing or hard hitting about the subject of race. Occasionally we see the stray racist comment made to either George or Rita, which could be seen as a contributing factor in George’s general rambunctiousness, and elements like the reason George’s father isn’t around maybe point to more ingrained societal racism but this ultimately doesn’t really seem like a central theme in the movie. Instead this feels somewhat in dialogue with something like the movie 1917 with George’s adventure through Blitz-era London acting as a sort of theme park ride through its historical setting to soak up various details of the time and place. Some of these details are interesting enough and the film does deconstruct the “keep calm and carry on” myth of the era here and there as some of these people are definitely not keeping calm, but I’m not sure there’s much of an overall statement being made about the era.

Regardless of if there’s a deeper message to be found here, the film also has some shortcomings just as a watchable adventure film and among the biggest of these is that George as a protagonist can be kind of annoying at times. The whole conflict of the movie is sparked by an act or reckless impulse by this kid and throughout he does dumb thing after dumb thing to ensure he doesn’t make his way home in a timely manner. The reasons the film has him behaving this way can certainly be defended: he’s just a kid, he’s traumatized from living through bombing raids, he’s othered by society giving him extra incentive to seek out the comforts of home, etc. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fundamentally kind of frustrating to try to follow a character with an unrealistic goal that they seek out inefficiently. There’s also something of a tension here as the movie continues to follow the Rita character as she looks for her son and the movie cuts between her and George’s perspectives but her searching ultimately doesn’t affect the story as much as it probably needed to and the subplot is something of a dead end. The film probably would have been better off just dropping her story and following the kid, a structure that probably would have allowed his story to exist in a sort of place of Spielbergian whimsy rather than as the actions of a thoughtless kid who’s worrying his mother to death.