Since his first feature ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ in 1988, British writer and director Terence Davies has made a handful of films that can be described as poetic because of their emotional subtlety and form precision. Lately, he’s been making movies about poets, which isn’t quite the same.
“Biopic” is a clumsy word for a prosaic genre, and screen writers’ biographies are literal rather than lyrical. I thought “A Quiet Passion,” Davies’ 2017 portrayal of Emily Dickinson’s life, was an exception, as attentive to the subject’s inner weather as to the details of her time and place. Some of Dickinson’s admirers thought otherwise, but I maintain that the film and Cynthia Nixon’s central performance brought to life the poet’s peculiar, indelible genius.
‘Benediction’, which is about the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, is in a sense a more conventional affair. Sassoon, whose life spanned from the late Victorian era to the 1960s, is primarily remembered as one of the war poets. Their experience in the trenches of World War I inspired verses that changed the diction and direction of English literature, and Davies opens the film vigorously with archival footage of massacres, accompanied by Sassoon’s ruthless words borrowed from poems, prose memoirs and letters.
Similar words and images recur at various points in a story that occasionally jumps in time, but which mainly tells the chronology of Sassoon’s post-war life. He is played in his 30s and 40s by Jack Lowden and as an older, unhappier man by Peter Capaldi, whose resemblance to late photos of Sassoon is uncanny.
Sassoon has already gained some fame as a writer while the war is still going on and circulates a scathing anti-war declaration refusing further service on the grounds that “the war is deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to to end.” He expects a court martial and willing, at least in principle, to appear before a firing squad, is instead summoned before a medical council, thanks to the intervention of a well-placed older friend named Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale). His pacifism is classified as a mental disorder and he is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where he reveals his homosexuality to a sympathetic doctor (Julian Sands) and befriends Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a younger poet who will become killed in action shortly before the armistice.
Sassoon’s subsequent social and romantic activities occupy much of the latter half of “Benediction,” meaning his writing fades into the background. The portrait of a haunted artist becomes a somewhat familiar scene of Britain between the wars, with Bright Young Things coming and going and speaking in beautifully twisted, horribly cruel sentences. (“That may have been a little too bitter,” Sassoon is told by the victim of one of his barbs.”mordant would be a more accurate word,” Sassoon replies.) Winston Churchill is mentioned as a well-known figure. Edith Sitwell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and TE Lawrence all make short appearances.
Davies offers an unhurried tour of the privileged, educated gay circles that set the tone of the times. I realize “gay” is a bit of an anachronism here, but many of Sassoon’s friends and loved ones — including Ross, the composer and matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and the legendary dilettante Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) — are aware of belonging to a tradition that intertwines sexuality with cultural attitudes and artistic pursuits. Oscar Wilde is invoked both as an idol and, because of his persecution in the 1890s, as a cautionary figure.
Sassoon and his cohort are committed to discretion, irony, and the occasional strategic compromise with heterosexuality. Sassoon’s marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips, then Gemma Jones) is loving and without illusions, producing a son named George (Richard Goulding), who endures the cranky conservatism of his father’s old age.
Sassoon’s complaints about rock and roll and his conversion to Roman Catholicism feel more like duly noted biographical facts than expressions of character. Even the more intimate passages in “Benediction” – the affairs with Novello and Tennant, and the heartbreak that follows at the end of each passage – are more subdued than impassioned. In part, this is a reflection of Sassoon’s own temperament, which he says the Doctor in Craiglockhart is characterized by circumspection and detachment. But the film never really evokes a link between life and work.
Except for an extraordinary few scenes that do not involve Sassoon’s work, but Wilfred Owen’s. Sassoon confesses that he looked down on Owen when they first met, both for class and age reasons, but comes to regard him as “the greater poet.” History has largely confirmed this verdict, and Davies brings it home with astonishing vigor.
At the hospital, Owen asks Sassoon for his opinion on a poem called “Disabled,” which Sassoon pronounces brilliantly after reading it in silence. Audiences won’t hear Owen’s words until the final scene of the film, when the poem’s heartbreaking story of a young man maimed in battle is rendered impressionistically on screen. Until then, we’ve thought about the war, interpreted it in poetry, and glimpsed its brutality. And then, through the filter of Sassoon’s haunted memory, we feel it.
blessing
Rated PG-13. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theatres.