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14 April 2024
Benediction
Director: Terence Davies 137 Minutes Cert: 12A
UK 2021
Having acquired some fame as a writer, Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi), while the First World War is still going on, circulates a scathing anti-war statement in which he refuses further service. Far from court martial and execution, thanks to the intervention of a well-placed older friend, named Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), his pacifism is classified as a psychological disorder, and he is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he discloses his homosexuality to a sympathetic doctor (Ben Daniels) and befriends Wilfrid Owen (Matthew Tennyson), the younger poet who will be killed in action just before the Armistice.
Sassoon's subsequent social and romantic
activities occupy much of the second half of Benediction.
Davies provides an unhurried tour of the priviledged, gay circles that
helped set the tone of the time. Many
of Sassoon’s friends and lovers — including Ross,
the composer and the matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and the
dilettante stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) — are conscious of
belonging to a tradition that entwines sexuality with cultural attitudes
and artistic pursuits.
Sassoon’s friends are committed to discretion, irony
and the occasional strategic compromise with heterosexuality. Sassoon’s
marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips, and then Gemma Jones) is
affectionate and without illusions: their son, George (Richard Goulding),
endures the cranky conservatism of his father’s old age.
Even the more intimate passages in Benediction — the affairs with
Novello and Tennant, and the heartache that follows the end of each one —
are more restrained than passionate. In part, this is a reflection of
Sassoon’s own temperament, which he tells the doctor at Craiglockhart is
marked by circumspection and detachment.
Sassoon confesses to looking down on Wilfred Owen when they first met,
for reasons of class as well as age, but comes to regard him as “the greater
poet.” History has mostly upheld this judgment, and Davies brings it home
with astonishing force. In the hospital, Owen asks Sassoon for his opinion
of a poem called Disabled which Sassoon pronounces brilliant after
reading it silently. We do not hear Owen’s words until the final scene of
the film, when the poem’s wrenching account of a young man maimed in battle
is impressionistically depicted onscreen. Up until that moment, we’ve
thought about the war, heard it rendered in poetry and caught glimpses of
its brutality. And then, through the filter of Sassoon’s tormented memory,
we feel it.