Saoirse Ronan and Paul Weller’s new World War II drama Blitz has been hailed as ‘incredibly moving’ and ’emotional’.
Leading lady Saoirse, 30, who stars as Rita in the new movie, has ‘pulled on viewers’ heartstrings’ in the gripping drama.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen, details a group of London natives amid the aerial bombing during the international conflict.
Blitz, a stirring drama set in September 1940, follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing in World War II.
Some of the characters in this enjoyably absorbing film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into something sour.
For instance, while everyone else is rolling out the barrel, there’s a criminal gang at work, stripping the dead of their jewels.
McQueen’s focus is an East End family of three. Single mum Rita shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut).
McQueen, whose own parents also came from the West Indies, was by all accounts inspired to create this yarn by a single wartime photograph of a young black evacuee.
Saoirse Ronan (pictured) and Paul Weller’s new World War II drama Blitz has been hailed as ‘incredibly moving’ and ’emotional’
Leading lady Saoirse, who stars as Rita in the new movie, has ‘pulled on viewers’ heartstrings’ in the gripping drama (Elliott Heffernan pictured)
Race and racism duly loom large. But, in essence, it’s an old-fashioned adventure story about a spirited kid who is furious when his devoted mother reluctantly decides that he must be evacuated and isn’t convinced by her hollow rhapsodies about the countryside. ‘Cows and horses smell,’ he says.
A little later he jumps off the train whisking him to safety and embarks on his arduous odyssey home.
Blitz is a chronicle of that return trip, which predictably, for dramatic purposes, is fraught with peril.
Nonetheless, McQueen still smartly subverts our expectations, evoking The Railway Children (1970) when George jumps aboard another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same thing – only for tragedy to bring our own sentimental journey to a screeching halt.
There are plainly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, too, when George is introduced by a kind of Nancy figure to this story’s version of Bill Sikes, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely-painted partner-in-crime.
One presumes their gang of thieves has a basis in reality.
Throughout, McQueen deftly weaves fact with fiction.
The aftermath of the bombing of the Cafe de Paris (which actually happened in March 1941) is meticulously re-created, and there really was a noisy campaign by Londoners to be allowed to shelter in Tube stations, which brings me neatly to Paul ‘Going Underground’ Weller.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen, details a group of London natives amid the aerial bombing during the international conflict
Blitz, a stirring drama set in September 1940, follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing in World War II
Some of the characters in this enjoyably absorbing film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into something sour
Blitz opened in cinemas on November 1. The film opens spectacularly with a fireman being knocked senseless by an out-of-control hose, and later there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a Tube station is flooded
McQueen’s focus is an East End family of three. Single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan, left) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (centre), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut)
The so-called ‘Modfather’ is boldly but perfectly cast as a wartime East End grandfather – and looks exactly as if he might be Ronan’s old dad.
She’s wonderful too, as she always is, as a mother at her wits’ end with worry.
But it’s Heffernan on whom the credibility of the story rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.
The other thing that McQueen has to get right –and does – is the particular tumult and trauma of the London Blitz.
The film opens spectacularly with a fireman being knocked senseless by an out-of-control hose, and later there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a Tube station is flooded.
Blitz opened in cinemas on November 1.
