“Blitz” is the worst film Steve McQueen made

There is no typical Steve McQueen film. Since he began making feature films in 2008 with his Irish hunger strike drama hungerThe artist and filmmaker’s work for the screen shows a fascinating restlessness, an unwillingness to commit to theme or structure. One can identify something of a guiding philosophy in McQueen’s interest in taking huge struggles between nations or against minority groups and making them palpable on an intimate and sensual level. But even that is more of a tendency than the unifying quality of a director who has gone from a cool portrait of a sex addict to a film shame to a devastating portrayal of slavery in 12 years slaveand from there to the sinewy heist film Widows and then to Small axea kaleidoscopic anthology series about London’s West Indian community.

McQueen’s most recent films are both about World War II and yet couldn’t be more different. Occupied citythe documentary he directed last year was a work of formal power and marathon running time, juxtaposing over four and a half hours of everyday footage from contemporary Amsterdam with the story of what happened in each location during the Nazi occupation . flashhis latest work, is a sentimental journey through London in 1940 and follows a boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) as he runs away from the train carrying him and other children evacuated to the countryside and returns to the destroyed city to find himself again to unite with his children’s mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan, who gives her all in a strange role that relies more than justifiably on her supporting role).

It’s the worst movie McQueen ever made, which in a broader sense means it still isn’t bad. But flashThe film’s admirable intentions always trump its execution, which is plodding and full of the narrative contrivances required to keep the angel-faced lead on the run from danger and the authorities who want to send him back to the train station. There’s a good deal of Dickensian style in his episodic adventures, never more evident than in the interlude in which George falls into the clutches of a gang of thieves, led by an unstable Stephen Graham, who need someone of small stature to break into a bombed-out house . on websites to steal the goods left behind.

But flash does not have the narrative drive of Dickens, which sees its young protagonist hopping from dangerous situation to dangerous situation, fleeing danger and the authorities who had put him back on the train. Through George, we see London struggling to keep its shattered social fabric intact as the horrors of nighttime hell rain down from above with German planes looming like monstrous creatures in the spotlight, but the film fails to trust his perspective, undermining his own frantic momentum by dropping in on Rita as she goes to her job at a munitions factory, neglecting to enjoy a childless evening at a pub, spending some time in the company of the neighbor (Harris Dickinson), with whom he is clearly in love She volunteers at an animal shelter and finally finds out that her son has disappeared.

Like Martin Scorsese Hugo and Todd Haynes’ Wonderful, flash It doesn’t feel like it’s taking place from a child’s perspective, but rather that of an adult who stoops to the level of a child and struggles to maintain that position. The prescriptive nature of his goals hinders his ability to fully engage with his protagonist as he is exposed to the ugliness and generosity of which humanity is capable. Not that he’s unfamiliar with the former – George’s father Marcus (CJ Beckford) is an immigrant from Grenada who was deported before George was born after some racists blamed him for an attack. George has grown up enduring insults from adults and fellow children, experiences that significantly increase his fear when he boards a train into the unknown and encounters some of the same attitudes from fellow passengers.

When centering flash About a mixed-race child thrown alone into the chaos of a war-torn country, McQueen aims to both poke holes in the propagandistic depictions of the period as a time of unified “keep calm and carry on” solidarity and expand the image of it a patriotic British identity that includes friendly Nigerian ARP supervisors, devoted Jewish community leaders and finally George himself as the unlikely hero of a hair-raising disaster in a subway station. flashThe desire to rewrite the sepia-toned historical mythology into something more expansive and less comforting is noble, but it also guides the film more than it should.

flash is more conventional than McQueen’s previous work, which wouldn’t be a problem if McQueen fully accepted this fact. Instead, his film is full of dead ends and digressions that suggest that he himself is impatient with the primary story he wants to tell. flash has taken a half-step into the world of musicals with a dazzling nightclub scene and a jazz bar scene reminiscent of the dance floor footage Lovers Rockand Ronan plays a song for the radio in front of her colleagues. As exuberant as these moments are, they also seem like incursions into a main narrative that already insists on throwing its delicately aged lead from traumatic situation to traumatic situation until it all borders on the absurd, as if George were in his own two decades The main role is played by the later urban version of 1917 without the advantage of the single shot device. flash must instead rely on other intrigues to keep going, keeping its protagonist in town but unable to get home. If his naive hero could have been trusted to drive the film forward in both his pauses and his set pieces, they might have been less embarrassing. Instead, flash makes you think not about the horrors of war and how they stay in the collective memory, but about how you should always listen to your mother.