Siegfried Sassoon drama stunningly merges biopic and autobiography.
More than a biopic about British war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction is also the most thorough-going exposition of Terence Davies’s lament that “the worst thing in life is that someone’s suffering goes unnoticed.” Benediction’s ostensible themes (art, religion, and sex) are addressed through Sassoon’s enigmatic history: the difficulties managing and comprehending his emotions whether in his writing (poems and essays stating his objection to the carnage of World War I); or his despair about death and life’s purpose, which inspires his need for faith over skepticism; and especially the cycle of personal relationships that complement his search for love.
Seeing all that through Davies’s signature tableaux makes Benediction the fullest, richest movie experience in years. Choosing Sassoon as his subject, Davies focuses on a cultural movement that is personally meaningful. The political and literary fashions of early-20th-century England included notable class and sexual advances just prior to the war. Sassoon’s aristocratic, front-row access to world-changing events is represented by a definitive Davies trope: A curtain rises to reveal actual period movie footage — black-and-white imagery of startling detail and immediacy — that pitches us into the war and the era’s tumult.
This epiphany combines Sassoon’s personal arousal (“something omnific, seminal, and adolescent”) with the moral awakening that affected generations and shaped Davies’s own sensibility. This Edwardian period is also the era of modernism — its awful and exciting legacy connects us to how Sassoon’s consciousness developed.
Time overlaps in each of Davies’s montages: Sassoon’s anxious adulthood (played by Jack Lowden), then his old-age regret (played by Peter Capaldi). Personal events are followed by their interiorized psychological reflection, the incantatory voice-overs recall the special sensitivity of Davies’s national memoir Of Time and the City. It’s “poetic without being symbolic,” to use Andrew Sarris’s description of this Josef von Sternberg technique, only Davies’s style is not so sexually ambiguous. (Vintage footage of now-dead soldiers in their spooky, virile youth is startlingly, sexually direct.)
Benediction is the culmination of a film career that was always up-front about the conflicts that Davies had with sexuality and his family and cultural heritage (in his masterpieces Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes). A Mass performed by a black priest (Jude Akuwudike) calls attention to the skepticism of the Catholic-raised filmmaker. Sassoon’s efforts to confront the war and realize himself among the personalities of his time parallel the social, political, religious, and sexual issues that inform every Davies film. Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh color the parade of characters, from Sassoon’s protégé poet Wilfred Owen to Ivor Novello, Winston Churchill, Edith Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morell — each with his or her private and public peccadilloes — making Benediction Davies’s own survey of the past century’s enlightenment.
In his A Quiet Passion, from 2017, Davies used Emily Dickinson’s biography as his own, relating to Dickinson’s desperate artistic expression and her reputation as a reclusive “no-hoper.” Sassoon’s glum persona contradicts his bon vivant advantages — at least that’s what Davies makes of Sassoon’s lifelong pessimism. He’s a difficult man. The impact of the war steeled his intransigence, driving the film’s tough-minded (emotional but not sentimental) first half. Through the spiritual confusion and timidity of his homosexuality (“the shadow life”), even Sassoon’s arrogance and missteps take dignified, affecting form.
During Sassoon’s wartime hospitalization for “nervous debility,” he meets Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson) and “talking cure” psychologist William Rivers (Ben Daniels), two kindred spirits (“one anomaly to another”) that put the film on high terrain — the illustration of gay sympathy is equal to Visconti’s grandest moments in Conversation Piece and Death in Venice. Davies has never before filmed such a love story, but the emotional interplay and articulation by Lowden, Daniels, and Tennyson is exquisite.
As much as Sassoon talked back to British wartime authority, Davies scrutinizes the evolution of the modern gay sensibility — dividing Benediction into dramatic segments, as in Distant Voices, Still Lives and his debut trilogy of shorts, Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration. Here’s a distinct, nonjudgmental look at the perfidies of homosexual license, vanity, and longing. Jeremy Irvine’s Novello, a dangerously gorgeous lothario, is shockingly different from Jeremy Northam’s Novello in Altman’s Gosford Park. Novello breaks Sassoon’s heart, compelling Davies’s uncompromised confession of inner-circle backbiting. In the bruising interplay of casual intimacies is a truth no politically insecure gay filmmaker has dared.
The exchange between thin, epicene men (“exogamous,” one says) is rather complicated for the film’s melodramatic second half. Davies’s skeptical portrayal of Sassoon’s capitulation to conventional marriage and fatherhood, loneliness, and regret needs more exposition. It’s less clear than the pacifist-focused drive of the film’s first half, which even found space for a diverting Edith Sitwell impersonation by Lia Williams. The war haunted Sassoon (he lived to age 81), but Davies sees more to the poet’s life than the abbreviated narrative can encompass.
With Benediction, Davies has arrived at a level of expression so emotionally detailed that it overwhelms biopic conventions. Tribute and autobiography merge. His imagery has gotten more supple, sometimes exuberant, looser yet precise. A split-screen montage of Sassoon recalling private portraits in flashback is so moving that Davies’s longtime interest in memory and consciousness finds the ideal distillation of distance and compassion. In the final image of Sassoon’s conflicted regrets and desires, Lowden achieves a nearly palpable realization of self-reproach and forgiveness. Scored to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia, it’s a triumphant silent-movie soliloquy.
