Steve McQueen's latest feature, his first since Widows (2018), leaving aside the doco Occupied City (2023). A day and a night in London, 1940, where the children are evacuated to the countryside and the bombs fall. We mostly follow the adventures of the young boy Elliott Heffernan, son of Saoirse Ronan and present-day absent CJ Beckford. He'll be a ladykiller soon enough. Grandfather Paul Weller drenches him in music while we get drowned by Hans Zimmer's heavy score.
The best parts are 1940s versions of Small Axe, the scenes of extreme self-abandonment in a high-energy jazz club in particular. There's a dash of Naked in how the city is traversed, and more obviously a direct lift from Dickens on the topic of child exploitation. I enjoyed Benjamin Clémentine's robust warden the most; he's even more striking here than he was as Herald of the Change in Dune (2021). The cinematography and editing are as good as you'd expect, and the jumping around in time is handled well enough.
On the less satisfying front McQueen spends less effort exploring the schisms in class exposed by the Blitz, just showing the working class against the constabulary and gatekeepers of the BBC, than he does on his preferred topic of racial tensions. On his account there were significant numbers of people from the West Indies in London in 1940, and that made me wish he'd spent more time with that community than the generic love-in-wartime woefulness involving Harris Dickinson he does show us. I was astonished that Weller's valve radio came up instantly; mine takes a good thirty seconds for any sound to emerge. Disappointing was Stephen Graham's unmodulated performance; we know he can do that but we're even more certain that he can do better. This was not Ronan's finest outing. The CGI was off-putting.
Afterwards I remembered Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual.
Dana Stevens: a dud. Luke Goodsell.
