‘Blitz’ Review: Love in the Ruins

World War II is almost certainly the big screen’s most immortalized conflict, and for good reason. It broke just as cinema was beginning to mature as a form of entertainment, and footage from the front narrated by peppy tales of victory was part of many people’s moviegoing experience. What’s more, though, the outlines of World War II could be boiled down to clean tales of good versus evil, bravery versus cruelty — the sort of stories that make good two-hour feature films.

As the historian Elizabeth Samet argues in her excellent 2021 book “Looking for the Good War,” the heroism performed in Hollywood’s World War II movies soon became the filter through which all American involvement in foreign wars was seen and encouraged. In the aftermath of war, she writes, “causes are retrofitted,” and “participants fondly recall heroic gestures.” The tendency extends far beyond America, because the tale of valor richly rewarded and goodness winning the day is the kind of World War II movie we want to see — and the kind we mostly have.

Yet most stories during the war didn’t end in glory and goodness. They ended in death and dismemberment, heartache and trauma, lives destroyed, families ripped apart. Yes, the good guys won. But winning a war still means losing.

The British film industry is hardly immune to the triumphalist tales, and watching “Blitz,” I began to have a strong suspicion that those are precisely the movie’s target. The filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose film “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture in 2014, works with the eye of a protesting artist, as aware of form as he is of content.

In his 2018 film “Widows,” about women pulling off a heist, the form is that of a crime thriller. But the real subject is the class and economic contradictions of Chicago, which McQueen paints into the background except in one subtle, unforgettable scene: As characters have a conversation of some note in a car, the camera stays resolutely pointed out through the windshield, and we watch the setting starkly change from run-down projects to exquisite mansions in a matter of minutes. It’s a gutting accompaniment to the machinations of power being discussed in the car. You can’t really take one without the other.