The most overlooked great filmmaker of the past 10-15 years has to be Steve McQueen. AFTER he directed a Best Picture Winner, he made an exciting heist thriller AND the most ambitious movie series in years, the Small Axe Anthology. He swings again with Occupied City, an ambitious, 4+ hour documentary about World War II. But as we know in baseball (or cricket, Steve), not every swing is a a home run, some times you miss.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city. You can get lost for hours walking through the canal laden central district, or among the Rembrandt paintings in the Rijksmuseum. But World War II forever layered a detailed complex history on top of one of Europe’s great cities. McQueen takes us through that harrowing 4ish year period where the Nazis had control of the city, and what happened to the people who lived there at the time.
The first hour of Occupied City is riveting. McQueen uses a great conceit: show us modern images of Amsterdam including during the COVID lockdowns, while narrating over that what was happening in the 1940s. The most powerful stuff is when we see an unassuming place in the city, and hear a haunting tale most of us have probably never heard by narrator Melanie Hyams about an atrocity that happened in this location. McQueen’s going for this complicated message: we’re reminded of the importance of even the most unassuming buildings and places, but also how quickly we are to forget our shared history in an effort to move into the future. Through tale after tale after tale, I certainly felt overwhelmed at Occupied City’s scope and scale, realizing the director was going to go building by building to tell every story he could find about occupied Amsterdam.
Those stories accumulate to just under 4 and a half hours, with a break in the middle. If there were some narrative drive of Occupied City I might have really stayed engaged with Steve McQueen’s doc. But there isn’t: the movie gives us a 10 minute story, then finds another building, tells another 10 minute story, and so on. 1 – 2 hours of this would be a fine doc. But 4? I almost fell asleep multiple times, because of Hyams’s soothing but monotone delivery. That boredom dilutes McQueen’s message. On top of that, many times when I wasn’t bored I was quite uncomfortably surprised by parallels McQueen drew between Nazi and Covid occupation, making morality leaps to equate the two. This is a rare time where the movie should be instead a PBS or BBC mini series, told in themed 1 hour segments that would get the point across best and give the audience time to think inbetween.
But hey Steve, good try. I still love you, but I didn’t love Occupied City. However, you did give the tourism board a new way to market to history buffs with this thing. Maybe partner with Amsterdam to have your doc played over and over again there, to the point where you’ll win and Occupied City will become more popular than even 12 Years a Slave! What a wild thought, but hey, when it comes to Steve McQueen, anything’s possible.