Poetic portrait of war hero Sassoon
Jack Lowden’s perfect as disillusioned soldier Siegfried Sassoon in his youth. But Peter Capaldi as the ageing writer sounds like a posh Scottish golfer
FEATURE films by British writer-director Terence Davies don’t come along very often — there have been nine since 1988 — but are usually worth watching when they do, even those that demand a certain perseverance.
Benediction, the story of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, slots into that category. It is pretty hard going but has its rewards.
Sassoon is splendidly played as a young man by Jack Lowden, and in later years, after he converts to Catholicism and grows deeply embittered, by Peter Capaldi.
Hard as he tries, Capaldi can’t quite suppress a faint Scottish twang, making Sassoon sound disconcertingly like a venerable member of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews... even if a less clubbable man would be hard to find.
Powerfully, Davies punctuates his drama with grainy real-life footage from the Great War, of shell bursts over the trenches and cheerful Tommies showing their gap-toothed smiles to the camera as they march to their doom.
He also makes effective use of Sassoon’s poetry, solemnly recited by Lowden over the archive pictures, although arguably the most piercingly poignant lines are, a little oddly, from A.E. Housman: ‘East and west on fields forgotten/ Bleach the bones of comrades slain/ Lovely lads and dead and rotten/ None that go return again.’
At the start of the film, Sassoon, having been decorated for formidable valour on the Western Front, has grown disillusioned with the way the war is being conducted and decides to become a conscientious objector.
THIS is punishable, at the very least, by public disgrace. So his friend Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale) quietly arranges for him to be declared mentally unfit, to swerve the stigma of perceived cowardice.
Grudgingly, Sassoon agrees to a stay in a military psychiatric hospital in Scotland (maybe that’s where he acquires the heathery vowel sounds for use later in life). There he bonds with a kindly psychiatrist (Ben Daniels) and clashes with the bristly commanding officer, who notes his attraction to another inmate, fellow poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), and suggests that chaps of their ilk should do the decent thing with a service revolver.
Themes of homosexuality are rarely far away in Davies pictures, even though — or possibly because — he is openly conflicted about being gay himself. ‘It has killed part of my soul,’ he has said.
Sassoon’s sexuality drives the film’s post-war narrative, as he has love affairs with songwriter Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Irvine as so ruthlessly callous that the organisers of the annual Ivor Novello awards should consider legal action), flamboyant socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) and actor Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).
In truth, Davies gets a little overexcited with the world of these Bright Young Things.
There is a famously corny exchange in the 1946 Bronte sisters biopic Devotion — ‘Morning Dickens’ . . . ‘Morning Thackeray’ — as two lavishly bearded gents pass one another, and, similarly, Sassoon can hardly sneeze without a bless-you from Noel Coward, Edith Sitwell or Lady Ottoline Morrell. Moreover, we are expected to believe that all these flapperera giants converse only by trading epigrams.
Davies is not above some clumsy expository dialogue by way of explaining that Beale’s character, Ross, had been a loyal friend to Oscar decades earlier.
All this gets a bit wearing, yet there is plenty in the film that is both moving and enlightening. O A VERY different crew of Bright Young Things populate Emergency, a decent if uneven comedy about two black friends on a US college campus who find a female white student unconscious in their dorm living room. She can’t be revived, hard as they try, but they feel sure that if they call 911, the police will blame them for getting her into that state — and possibly worse.
From the start, Carey Williams’s film makes some trenchant observations about racism in liberal as well as illiberal America.
There are also some genuinely funny moments, for instance when one of the young men, Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), attempts cardio-pulmonary resuscitation while singing along to Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive.
Touches like that make this a movie worth seeing.