In the nearly 11 years since 12 Years a Slave won best picture at the Academy Awards, writer-director Steve McQueen has never again sought out such mainstream accolades – just as he never sought them out before 12 Years a Slave. His first two features, Hunger and Shame, were about a hunger strike and sex addiction, both starring Michael Fassbender. After the Oscar win, he made a female-fronted crime movie (Widows) and the series of five “films” known as Small Axe, which came by their high critical acclaim honestly as most were about an hour long and more accurately classified as a television miniseries. You get the sense that 12 Years a Slave wasn’t conceived as an Oscar frontrunner either, it just kind of turned out that way.

Yet in his latest film, the World War II-set Blitz, there’s barely any trace of the McQueen who has profiled as an iconoclast his entire career. This is a traditional period piece with heightened acting styles and swelling music, conventional claptrap if ever there was. The film’s two main messages seem to be: 1) It was really bad that the Germans bombed the shit out of London during the infamous blitzkrieg period; 2) Some people were also racist toward a boy with a white mother and a black father, and that was also bad.

If it seems like those comments are making little of Blitz, Blitz earns it. The miscalculations in this movie are many. The bombings are recreated in a way that feels simultaneously tied to realism and also empty, lacking in impact despite the number of times the film pleads for us to stare in horror at the smoking husks of buildings. It fails to register on a character level and has altogether too many scenes that depend on the dramatic heft of child actors.

The primary child actor is Elliott Heffernan, who plays George, the mixed race son of a widow named Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and a father we meet only briefly in flashback (CJ Beckford). George and Rita live with Rita’s father, Gerald (musician Paul Weller). It’s 1940, and the neighbourhood of Stepney Green is subjected to nightly air raids, which cause residents to scurry from their homes and yell at train officials who refuse to open up the underground to shelter them from the massacre raining down upon them. It’s no place for a child of about 12, so Rita tries to ship George off to the countryside with a lot of other children from the city who are being so protected. Having already told her he hates her on the station platform, George then decides to make his own way back to London by jumping off the train out in the country.

Thus begins an odyssey that somehow takes up only a couple of days, in which George will have many misadventures, including a short period in the clutches of Albert (Stephen Graham), a criminal in charge of a gang of petty thieves, who is basically a stand-in for Fagan from Oliver Twist. (And that’s never not a ridiculous choice.) Rita only belatedly becomes aware that George’s whereabouts are no longer known, and it sets her into a tizzy indeed.

It’s hard to describe how dispiritingly conventional Blitz feels without seeing it, especially since McQueen opens on a note that would suggest otherwise. In a thrilling example of technique ultimately absent from the rest of the film, McQueen starts with a number of interesting visual choices, like a high-speed blurring of a field of flowers intercut with the perspective of bombs falling, shot from one metre below them as they fall. McQueen is a director who could transform subject matter that is ultimately indebted to more staid genres, and he appears positioned to do so.

Then he just doesn’t. And this is despite including plenty of material that could be viewed as quite personal for the director. McQueen is black, so you can see the importance of George’s struggle to determine his own racial identity through several filters, both wanted (a soldier he meets of Nigerian heritage, played by Benjamin Clementine) and unwanted (the teasing of boys on the train). The episodes of teasing in particular feel sort of old hat at this point, the probably inevitable consequence of hundreds of movies that have dealt with both low-level and truly pernicious racism. Just seeing a bunch of ignorant boys talk about his hair and call him a monkey doesn’t hit us the way it once might have, and this is typical of the milquetoast impact of many of McQueen’s gestures.

Saoirse Ronan is rightly considered one of the best actresses under 30 – well, she’s now exactly 30 – but she isn’t able to help out much here either. It’s a role she could do in her sleep: a bright young woman who is generically strong and obviously enlightened due to her previous relationship with a black man and the way she once railed against the injustice of him being falsely arrested. But no personality emerges beyond this. To the extent that she is defined at all, she is defined by her generic outrage over the fact that her son is missing.

And her son’s misadventures … they’re really misses. Most cringeworthy is this thankfully temporary period where McQueen stages a Dickensian novel, with George doing the bidding of cackling band of Cockney-accented miscreants who loot from abandoned buildings and even steal the jewellery from corpses. Paradoxically, the one truly effective time McQueen confronts us with the horrors of war is undercut by this band of fools. We should ordinarily be taken aback by a room full of people in fancy evening wear, lying dead where they sit, except that McQueen has chosen to have Fagan and his cohorts play with the corpses like they were ventriloquist dummies, casually throwing around severed limbs, and laughing the whole time. There aren’t any moral grey areas in this film, as McQueen can’t depict these people without suggesting they think it’s hilarious that people are dead.

McQueen’s first five features after many shorts – if you want to call Small Axe a feature for these purposes – all established, above all else, that the director has good taste. He has known how to make a movie with style, but not overwhelming style, about subject matter that is important, but not so important that we’re already worn out on cinematic depictions of it. World War II is about as worn out as it gets, and McQueen’s ideas how to animate this particular corpse have utterly abandoned him.

 

Blitz is currently streaming on AppleTV+.