He has said the inspiration for this WWII movie was a picture of a little light skinned black child walking by himself during the Evacuation of the children of London. He wanted to remind everyone that the German’s attack on London was not solely an attack on pasty people, but that there was a lively and vibrant black community living there, including interracial couples.
This is true I think. But the really good thing about this movie is that it accepts the interracial aspect and doesn’t pound it over our heads. The little boy experiences prejudice, hatred, because of his color, but the main story is about the gallery of rogues he meets when he decides to jump the train and run home.
Getting home is far more difficult than he realizes, and he’s got almost nothing but a sandwich and a tiny bit of pocket change. Eventually, the authorities realize that he hasn’t arrived at his destination family, and have to tell Siorsese Ronan, his mother, that he is missing. This is unfortunate as far as the script goes because she then goes out to “find him,” but London is a sprawling town and there isn’t that much she can do. This sort of gives her character a kind of pointlessness, where earlier in the movie she had an urgency that was more palpable.
I think the jury is still out on Steve McQueen. I sometimes can’t understand what his movies are really about. The first one that I saw was Hunger, where Michael Fassbender played Bobbie Sands, the hunger striker who died during the Thatcher era. Even though it was a grueling depiction of what the British did to the Irish political prisoners in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, I sometimes felt he just wanted to see Fassbender be as naked as possible. Then Shame, the next one I saw, didn’t seem to me to depict shame at all and Fassbender, again, was walking around naked with his huge floppy cock. 12 Years A Slave won for best movie that year but it did catch some criticism, especially the movie critic Armand White, who called it torture porn and got himself kicked out of The New York Film Critics Circle for heckling Steve McQueen for this very reason. I always thought White was perhaps one of the worst critics out there, back when he wrote for the New York Press, but there was, indeed, a kind of over the top quality about 12 Years A Slave, especially the whipping scene, which I assume was the scene White was referring to as torture porn. And then this one, where some real ghoulish grave robbers play with dead bodies and laugh about them as they steal their valuables. He might go too far, but in spite of that I don’t think I really know what his movies are about or who they’re for. But hell, he’s had a full career already and he gets great actors.