Benediction (Preview)
Reviewed by Graham Fuller

Produced by Michael Elliott; written and directed by Terence Davies; cinematography by Nicola Daley; edited by Alex Mackie; costume design by Annie Symons; production design by Andy Harris; sound by Stephen Griffiths; starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Ben Daniels, Matthew Tennyson, Simon Russell Beale, Geraldine James, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Anton Lesser, Kate Phillips, Gemma Jones, Richard Goulding, Tom Blyth, and Julian Sands. Color, 137 min A Roadside Attractions release.

Terence Davies’ Benediction crystallizes an imagined inner life, lived in anguish, by the British soldier and First World War poet and author Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). As the biopic flashes backward and forward in time, the young Sassoon (Jack Lowden)—a no-nonsense officer, debonair man about town, and subservient lover—dominates the first two-thirds, while the final third shows the embittered older Sassoon (Peter Capaldi) struggling to make sense of his memories. Incalculable loss and romantic despair are Sassoon’s lot, yet the maker of such films as Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Deep Blue Sea (2011), and Sunset Song (2015) knows that unmitigated misery won’t do. The war having concluded as a temporal event in the early part of the narrative, much of the second act comprises a comedy of malice enacted by rich, beautiful gay men in (and out of) evening dress moving among London’s cultural elite. The juxtaposition of the cataclysm on the Western Front—depicted via archival footage and photographs—with acidic Wildean love spats renders Davies’ ninth full-length feature disarming.  

Benediction is sparing in its details of Sassoon’s privileged early life and his military exploits, Davies empathizing more with elements of his subject’s journey that relate to his own: namely, Sassoon’s unfulfilled gay love life and his conversion to Catholicism in 1957. The lapsed Catholic Davies has spoken in interviews of living singly, as did Sassoon after he separated from his wife Hester (played by Kate Phillips and, as an older woman, by Gemma Jones). 

Sassoon was the middle son of an Anglo-Catholic woman enamored of Wagner’s operas and a wealthy Jewish businessman, who left the family when Siegfried was four, dying in 1895. Sassoon had a love affair with another student, David Cuthbert Thomas, at Cambridge and beguiled himself thereafter as a gentleman sportsman and Tennysonian poet until he enlisted as a cavalry trooper two days before war was declared. After his younger brother Hamo died during the Gallipoli Campaign and Thomas was killed near Fricourt, Second-Lieutenant Sassoon demonstrated increasingly reckless courage and was nicknamed “Mad Jack” by his devoted men in the Royal Welch Fusiliers.  

Awarded the Military Cross in July 1916, Sassoon was already famous for his sardonic war poetry. He became infamous, while recuperating from a wound in England, for sending his commanding officer a non serviam statement protesting the British government’s prolonging “of a war of aggression and conquest.” It was politicized by its reading in the House of Commons and publication in The Times on July 31, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres. Rather than recommend the court martial of a decorated officer, an Army medical board deemed Sassoon insane and sent him to the Craiglockhart War Hospital, a sanitarium near Edinburgh that rehabilitated officers afflicted with shell shock. Sassoon was treated there by the pioneering Freudian psychologist W.H.R. Rivers (1864–1922) and mentored his fellow patient and war poet Wilfred Owen. Rejoining his battalion in France, Sassoon consciously embarked on near-suicidal missions. Following a head wound sustained by friendly fire at Arras in July 1918, he was invalided home. 

Sassoon devoted the next eighteen years to detailing his life up to 1918 in fiction. The three resulting novels, published between 1928 and 1936, recount the sporting exploits and military career of one George Sherston. Though Sherston’s Aunt Evelyn (a surrogate for Sassoon’s mother Theresa Thorneycroft) features in the extended roman à clef, it mentions only two women Sassoon’s age. Sherston instead recalls male “dream friends,” two of whom perished in the war. In 1933, Sassoon married Hester Gatty, who gave birth to their son George in 1936. The couple separated in 1945. 

Known less for his novels than his scathing verse, Sassoon is typically grouped with Owen and other First World War I soldier-poets such as Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Rupert Brooke. Owen, who was killed a week before the Armistice, is commonly regarded as the most gifted among them. Speculating that Sassoon fell in love with the gentle Owen (played by Matthew Tennyson, a descendant of Alfred, Lord Tennyson) at Craiglockhart but was too inhibited —and “shamed by an inner corruption”—to risk marring their friendship by pursuing an affair, Davies has Sassoon morosely admitting to Rivers (Ben Daniels) that Owen is the better poet. Similarly, the gaunt, ashen older Sassoon laments to George that he hasn’t been significantly honored for his poetry. If this peevishness derives from Sassoon’s sense of futility, the film’s implication that his bitterness is as attributable to his romantic disappointments as it is to the horrors of war he had witnessed, is a complexity that needs untangling…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 4