Struggling to heal from war’s pain
are bizarre and indicate a director working at a high level of inspiration, intuition and engagement with the material. Davies isn’t suggesting that, in these moments, Sassoon is thinking of that song or picturing World War I footage. Rather, he’s putting together sounds and images so as to create, within the viewer, an emotion that simulates Sassoon’s pain and disconnection.
This wedding of unrelated sounds and images requires that a filmmaker feel totally free to trust his imagination, but at the same time he can’t be sloppy. “Benediction” is an awesome combination of wildness and control. Davies is out there all by himself, speaking a cinematic language that is his own and that has little to do with plays or literature.
In Sassoon, Davies found a fascinating story to tell. During World War I, having experienced the horror of the trenches, Sassoon decided to formally and publicly protest the war. The government, not wanting to shoot a noted poet for desertion, ruled that he had battle fatigue and put him in a military hospital. There he met and mentored fellow poet Wilfrid Owen, with whom he had a strong romantic connection, whether or not they ever had a physical relationship.
Much of “Benediction” deals with Sassoon’s homosexuality, with some brilliant moments of subtlety along the way. At one* point, Sassoon goes into the office of the Army psychiatrist, and immediately we know the therapist is gay, too. How Davies, a gay director, is able to convey this information (later confirmed) within no more than a half-second is a mystery. But he does it, somehow and unmistakably.
The life-changing ordeal of Sassoon’s life was the war. The half century that followed was about his coming to terms with what he’d experienced. That Davies could make a compelling 137-minute drama out of Sassoon’s rather scattered search for meaning — through sex, through marriage and family, through religion — is a testament to his skill as a dramatist. He is never boring.
Davies plays fast and loose with some of the chronology: He extends Sassoon’s friendship with art critic Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale) into the 1920s, something Ross would have appreciated, as he died in 1918. He extends Sassoon’s marriage to Hester Gatty into the 1950s, though they separated in 1945. In the movie’s most inexplicable touch, he casts 70-year-old Anton Lesser to play Sassoon’s former lover Stephen Tennant, at a point in time at which Tennant was about 45 years old.
Quibbles aside, “Benediction” is a major work by a gifted and original filmmaker.