Elliott Heffernan, left, and Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz” 2024. IMDb photo

“Blitz,” director Steve McQueen’s latest film, gives us the very Irish and sort of American (born here) Saoirse Ronan, the young woman we all fell in love with as she stole our hearts in films like “Lady Bird” and, surely, in “Brooklyn.”

MOVIE INFO

“BLITZ”
Action, Drama, History, War
The stories of a group of Londoners during the German bombing campaign of the British capital during World War II.
Length: 120 minutes
Rating: Moderate violence, gore, frightening and intense scenes, with mild sex, nudity, profanity, alcohol, drugs and smoking
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer: Steve McQueen
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clémentine

And now she’s back and on our big screens (and now on Apple TV+ as of Nov. 22) in McQueen’s “Blitz.”

Saoirse comes to us as “Rita,” a young factory worker hiding a broken heart as she works in a munitions factory. We see Germany begin their crushing nighttime bombing of London, designed to crush the spirit of Churchill’s England.

We’ve seen that done before, but McQueen, with his gifts, takes us through all of that again with the deaths and nighttime horrors of the battle for Britain.

McQueen, in his film, brings us down from the greater horror to focus on Rita and her 9-year-old, half-Black son, George (Elliott Heffernan). She is caught in a struggle to keep her job and save her son.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Ealing Studios films that gave us the almost sanitized “Miniver” family of the 1943 Oscar pic, and that kept actors like Greer Garson, Walter Pigeon and others employed throughout the war.

But the deaths in those films were kept hidden in telegrams and newspapers headlines, in unheard telephone voices and the faces of those hearing them. Those were the movies folks of my age grew up with.

Not until the ’50s and on, when the blood got redder and bodies multiplied, did we see the real war.

McQueen clearly did his homework here to bring the terror, aided by his cinematographer, Yorick Le Saux.

Here in McQueen’s film, we follow the travels of the young half-Black boy in a very white London, who Rita has to put on a train to the countryside (where German bombs rarely fell) to save his life.

Young George sits unhappily on the train with mostly white children, all attempting to escape a London on fire. Here, George makes a decision to go home.
And it’s here that McQueen forces us to “jump” our own trains and walk back on the rails to a dark past we survived.

George jumps off the train and walks the jungle of the tracks back to his mother, and because of McQueen’s gifts, we walk with him, and because of George’s determined and scared eyes, we take his hand.

We remember that Rita took from her neck a St. Christopher medal, given her from an almost forgotten black lover, George’s father, in the long ago and hung it around her son’s neck.

Remembering that forces us to live through our own wars, and remember our own medals, our own fears and tears, and our own dead.

George jumps, a little suitcase in hand, and is suddenly adrift as a stranger in a strange land that McQueen creates.

There is where McQueen’s film, with the gifts of his brilliant cinematographer Le Saux, really takes our hands, and films loneliness in color.

McQueen’s “Blitz” does all of that to us, and for two hours George meets the street people, real “Fagins,” soulless hardened criminals who enlist him to enter bombed out houses and steal the jewels of the dead. No Minivers, dead or alive here.

Truth is, Britain has many young actors who could have brought “Rita” alive. But Saoirse Ronan is the star of the moment, and deservedly so. She has years of rails to walk, I pray.

McQueen, we remember, won the Turner Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and an Academy Award for Best Picture for “Twelve Years a Slave” in 2014. He was also nominated for Best Director that year for directing that film.

“Blitz” belongs, in my thought, to the work of Elliott Heffernan, the beautiful, talented child who is George. He holds the idea of “George” in his dark eyes, and we see it.

So where did they find him? Elliott, we are told, was discovered in a nationwide open casting call. That’s like winning the lottery.

George is quiet and eerily effective and really shows the almost spiritual bond he has with his mother and grandfather.

The great Hans Zimmer gives us the score.

“Blitz,” if you’re a fan of Mr. McQueen, recently showed at Waterville’s Maine Film Center, and began streaming on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.