Lowden shines in unflattering light
THOUGH Jack Lowden’s often talked of as a potential Bond, the supremely gifted actor doesn’t need a franchise to put him on the map. Aged 31, he’s as soulful as Tom Hiddleston and as cheeky as Simon Pegg. Which comes in handy for this mercurial portrait of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. Lowden’s convincing as a playful charmer who when faced with horrors doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
Though stuffed with big houses and beautiful toffs, this offering from writer-director Terence Davies was never going to seduce the Downton Abbey set. It’s too experimental; too slow. But if you love Davies, you’ll be transported by scenes that hint at deep feelings, as opposed to nailing them down.
Music, as ever with this director, provides lovely jolts. Archive footage of cattle, and British soldiers being treated like cattle, accompanies the song Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend), released by Vaughn Monroe in 1950. It’s outrageously anachronistic. Yet it’s perfect.
Benediction comes unstuck only when it seeks to interest us in Sassoon’s inter-war love life and God-bothering in later age (Peter Capaldi: wasted). Siegfried, apparently, had terrible taste in men and we are encouraged to boo two of his preening and poisonous lovers. Though Jeremy Irvine and Calam Lynch (as Ivor Novello and Stephen Tennant) massively overplay their parts, it’s the script that’s at fault. We can’t tell if their bitchy one-liners are meant to be tedious or titillating. If Davies is trying to demonstrate how empty these pretty boys are, he labours the point. If the plan was to have their Wildean wit double as a guilty pleasure, Davies should have worked harder on the gags.
So is Benediction worth seeing? At one point, Sassoon’s pretentious pal Edith Sitwell (Lia Williams; spry) admits her most recent work has been met with less than rapturous enthusiasm. She glumly repeats a withering remark made by a member of the audience: “It’s this sort of thing that makes one glad to be semi-conscious.”
Some will find parts of this film hard to endure, yet at its best it’s ferociously good — a period drama that shows an iconic figure getting wizened, rather than wiser.
• In cinemas