Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well-made and unabashedly old wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – overall a bit trad, at times evoking the spirit of Lionel Jeffries' The Railway Children. – Below.
It's a film about the Blitz of 1940, which tries to rethink accepted images, dramatic stock scenes and familiar ideas, but also embraces revisionist approaches – increasingly accepted nowadays: it evokes the way British wartime officers reverently evoked loyalty to the Empire. and the Commonwealth but maintained a casual racist attitude towards people of real colour.
The cheerful obedience of London's East End working class was taken seriously, although they were not widely or readily allowed to stay in underground stations and their safety once there was neglected. Then there is the gruesome and common history – not widely acknowledged until recently – of looting and corpse looting. For these brutal, neo-Dickensian scenes, Stephen Graham and Cathy Burke come closest to stealing the entire film; Their gargoyle faces are like something out of a dream-melodrama, in another mood, another type, another life-stage, McQueen could have given freer rein and more importance to the inner world of these people, full of evil and fear.
Saoirse Ronan gives a sympathetic and restrained performance in a role that doesn't allow for too much nuance: she plays Rita, a biracial boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) and a mother who lives with her father Gerald (Paul Weller) in Stepney, East London. . He was selected for a BBC radio show where he works in an munitions factory, giving morale-boosting broadcasts that allow ordinary workers to sing on air. Kutzy, nervous Rita nervously does a lot and does well, but as she finishes, a co-worker grabs the mic and demands more security for the public – much to the pompous fury of the chaps in charge.
Jack (Harris Dickinson), a firefighter, finds Rita shyly sweet, though he's still reeling from remembering how his Grenadian partner was persecuted by racists and deported. And, even more intolerable, Rita is forced to let George escape to the countryside, but George bravely jumps off the train at the first opportunity he gets and heads back to the city, on a desperate mission to reunite with her. Mom and there are adventures along the way – interspersed with Rita's own tense existence – including an encounter with Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a lovable Nigerian ARP warden who supports George. As for Rita, she finds help in shelters set up by socialist community organizers.
It's sometimes a bit broad brush, and I was surprised about the freedom with what is perhaps realistic and believable – but rather than strange things-fictional things usually happen in the chaos of war. But McQueen has made a decision to embody a kind of Ealing or the spirit of the Children's Film Foundation – direct, muscular, irregular and most importantly ugly. His films are always watchable, and he always keeps the storytelling strings tight: things that seem easy but aren't.
Right or not, I expected a more intense shocker or a more unique authorial challenge from this film. Well, that wasn't the movie McQueen wanted to make. The unexpected is the artist's forte.
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