Saoirse Ronan and Paul Weller’s new World War II drama Blitz has been praised as ‘incredibly moving’ and ’emotional’.
Leading lady Saoirse, 30, who plays Rita in the new film, has ‘pulled the viewer’s heartstrings’ in the gripping drama.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar winner Steve McQueen, chronicles a group of London residents amid the aerial bombardments of the international conflict.
A gripping drama set in September 1940, Blitz follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events surrounding the bombing of the British capital in World War II.
Some of the characters in this enjoyably compelling film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into something sour.
For example, while everyone else is rolling out the barrel, there is a criminal gang at work, stripping the dead of their jewels.
McQueen focuses on a family of three in the East End. Single mother Rita shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and her father Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his acting debut).
McQueen, whose own parents also came from the West Indies, was inspired to create this yarn by a single war photo of a young black evacuee.
Saoirse Ronan (pictured) and Paul Weller’s new World War II drama Blitz has been praised as ‘incredibly moving’ and ’emotional’
Lead actress Saoirse, who plays Rita in the new film, has ‘pulled the viewer’s heart’ in the gripping drama (Elliott Heffernan in the photo)
Race and racism lurk. But at its core it’s an old-fashioned adventure story about a feisty little boy who becomes enraged when his devoted mother reluctantly decides he must be evacuated and is unconvinced by her empty rhapsodies about the countryside. “Cows and horses stink,” he says.
Moments later he jumps out of the train and takes it to safety and begins his arduous odyssey home.
Blitz is a chronicle of that return journey, which, for dramatic purposes, is predictably fraught with danger.
Nevertheless, McQueen still cleverly subverts our expectations and is reminiscent of The Railway Children (1970) when George jumps aboard another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same – only then the tragedy causes our own sentimental journey comes to a screeching halt.
There are also clearly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, when George is introduced by a sort of Nancy figure in the story version of Bill Sikes, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely painted partner-in-crime.
You assume that their gang of thieves has a basis in reality.
Throughout the film, McQueen deftly interweaves fact with fiction.
The aftermath of the bombing of the Café de Paris (which actually took place in March 1941) is meticulously recreated, and there really was a vociferous campaign by Londoners to be allowed to take shelter in tube stations, which neatly brings me to Paul’s Going Underground Weller.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar winner Steve McQueen, chronicles a group of London residents amid the aerial bombardments during the international conflict
A gripping drama set in September 1940, Blitz follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events surrounding the bombing of the British capital in World War II.
Some of the characters in this enjoyably compelling film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into something sour
Blitz premiered in theaters on November 1. The film opens spectacularly with a firefighter being knocked unconscious by an out-of-control hose, and later there is a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a subway station is flooded.
McQueen focuses on a family of three in the East End. Single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan, left) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (centre) and her father Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his acting debut)
The so-called ‘Modfather’ is daring but perfectly cast as a wartime East End grandfather – and looks exactly as if he could be Ronan’s old dad.
She’s also wonderful, as she always is, as a mother at her wits’ end with worry.
But it is Heffernan on whom the story’s credibility rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.
The other thing McQueen needs to rectify – and does – is the specific tumult and trauma of the London Blitz.
The film opens spectacularly with a firefighter being knocked unconscious by an out-of-control hose, and later there is a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a subway station is flooded.
Blitz hit theaters on November 1.