Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

Yet for all the brilliance of the filmmaking, the movie becomes more and more remote as it goes on, and by the end I felt it had fallen out of my grasp. The main problem is that, oddly, it sidelines its own subject. It’s hardly surprising to see McQueen (who also wrote the screenplay) include scenes that depict the racism suffered by people of color in England while, ironically, England is fighting an enemy that promotes racial purity. And of course there’s no reason why he can’t make a movie that centers on that irony; Rachid Bouchareb did precisely that in his extraordinary 2006 Days of Glory (Indigènes), about the North African troops fighting for France during the Second World War. But McQueen also wants to make a movie more generally about the experience of the Blitz, and every time McQueen interpolates a scene about race it has the peculiar effect of making you feel that he’s shifted pictures. It doesn’t help that those are the worst sequences – didactic and simplified. When George makes it back to London he crosses paths with a compassionate Nigerian cop named Ife (Benjamin Clémentine) who is surprised that the boy doesn’t think of himself as Black. When Ife puts George in a shelter for the night he breaks up a quarrel between a white couple and a handful of people of color (not all the same color) who resent the couple’s putting up a blanket to cordon themselves off from their temporary neighbors. Ife tears down the barrier and gives them a lecture about why the war is being fought, after which George, who adores this man, affirms enthusiastically, “I’m Black!” The episode is like a scene from a bad children’s book with its little moral lesson underlined; it’s also like that dreadful screed “Carefully Taught” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific. When John Boorman made his magnificent 1987 Hope and Glory, he managed to suggest eight-year-old Billy’s education at the hands of the Blitz without throwing in a single moral cliché; in fact, working from Billy’s emotional point of view, he made wartime sententiousness – the stock in trade of most of the movies made in and about England during that era – the real enemy. He was also smart enough to make his film funny. (There aren’t too many laughs in Blitz.)

The other problem with McQueen’s picture is weirder. He embraces the idea of mixed tones as a principle in this movie, and it’s certainly one I applaud. But his tonal shifts are sometimes puzzling; they can come across as indecisiveness. The Oliver Twist subplot I referred to earlier shows up in the middle of the movie, when hungry, lost George is picked up by a young woman named Jess (Mica Ricketts) who catches him salivating outside a bakery. She feeds him and takes him home to a den of thieves – one of them is Christopher Chung from TV’s Slow Horses, who unfortunately has only one line and nothing to do – run by a sometimes demented, sometimes violent man who’s like a cross between Fagin and Bill Sikes and uses the boy’s size against his will and forces him to operate as a junior robber. (Later in the film George’s size works in tandem with his bravery to save some lives, though McQueen, for some reason, omits the climax of this episode.) Jess stands in for Nancy, obligingly turning her back so the boy can get away from this evil influence. McQueen moves from this Dickensian material to a scene at a glamorous club where moneyed patrons enjoy two talented Black performers, a tap dancer with startling long legs (Devon McKenzie-Smith) and a Big Band singer (Celeste); at its climax a bomb whistles above the ballroom and everyone inside holds their breath in terrified anticipation. Then McQueen inserts a staggering piece of leaping continuity: in an instant we’re back in the club after the bomb has destroyed the building and left bodies in its wake. The scene is a tour de force. But then he wrecks it. Enter the thieves, who strip the dead of their jewels. While we’re wondering how the hell they got in before the cops and the home guard, McQueen turns the scene into an absurdist vaudeville, with the thieves pretending to play a high-society burlesque with the corpses. It’s not just a tonal mess but a stylistic one, and the effect is of an artist slashing his own canvas. The movie’s finale, where mother and child come together again, isn’t as egregious but I think it suffers from the same problem.

Young Elliott Heffernan is very good as George; all the children – George encounters several in the early part of his travels – acquit themselves well. And Ronan, who is probably as gifted as any young actress in movies right now, relaxes into the period with the same ease and facility she drew on when she inhabited the 1930s in Atonement and the 1950s in Brooklyn. It’s not a great part, but she gives a flawless performance. And the singer-songwriter Paul Weller brings warmth to the role of George’s grandfather, who plays piano in the local pub and teaches him his favorite expression, “All mouth, no trousers,” which George uses on a local bully who calls him a Black bastard in the middle of a stickball game in the street. It’s a charming moment, and Weller’s own charm is subtle but genuine.

Claude Jarman, Jr., as Jody Baxter in The Yearling.

The three best coming-of-age movies to come out of Hollywood in the forties were National Velvet (1945), The Yearling (1946) and Intruder in the Dust (1949). They were all helmed by the same man, Clarence Brown, who came up in the silent era and was Greta Garbo’s favorite director. He died at ninety-seven in 1987 but he had retired three and a half decades later, after making fifty-one films; the trio listed above were numbers 43, 44 and 46. National Velvet, starring the breathtakingly beautiful twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, and The Yearling, based on the moving Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings young adult narrative, both belong to that subgenre of coming-of-age pictures in which the child hero’s connection with an animal guides the child toward adulthood. Intruder in the Dust is an adaptation of William Faulkner’s last – and least known – great novel. Brown shot it in Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, using locals in some of the roles, and the towering African American actor Juano Hernandez in the part of Lucas Beauchamp, who inherited a plot of land that is the envy of most of his white neighbors and who refuses to kowtow to them. The protagonist, though, is Chick Mallison, a teenage white kid whose oddball relationship with Lucas – who saves him from drowning, makes the boy uncomfortably beholden to him and then calls on him for help when Lucas is framed for murder – teaches the boy how to transcend the boundaries between Black and whites in the mid-twentieth-century South. Claude Jarman, Jr., who played Jody Baxter, the protagonist of The Yearling, at twelve and Chick in Intruder in the Dust at fifteen, died Sunday at the age of ninety. His work in both movies is very much in the studio-era style, but it’s lovely and touching. I plan to run both these movies this week in tribute to both Jarman and Clarence Brown.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.