A new film by British master Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) is usually a cause for celebration, and Benediction finds the director-screenwriter deeply connected to his subject matter. After an off-balance attempt to capture the essence of revered American poet Emily Dickinson in the mannered A Quiet Passion (2016), Davies does a superb job getting under the skin of British anti-war, anti-conformist poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose experiences as an officer in the trenches of World War I were a source of both his most revelatory poetry and a lifetime of anguishing memories.
Sporting great potential to turn into a melancholy, down-beat story like Emily Dickinson’s, Benediction does nothing of the sort. Its hero is totally engaged in life, and Davies’ skillful interweaving of his personal story with that of a corrupt, careless society creates a meaningful, textured story of universal import. With a wealth of secondary characters, including many artistic and literary figures of the day, it recreates the fractured period of the 1910s and 20s with the sensitivity and attention to detail of his finest work.
Overlaid with a vivid, at times sickening evocation of the war (including archive footage used as it should be in a feature film, as an intensifying device) is the retelling of the poet’s tumultuous search for love in the arms of handsome young men from his upper class social circle. In a chain of ever-changing lovers, he loses the men he loves one after the other, until he is left emotionally empty. The multi-faceted performance of Scottish actor Jack Lowden (Dunkirk) reaches for, and does a good job catching, the complexity of the poet, who comes alive as a sensitive country gentleman with a charming way with words and unusual courage in standing up for his views against jingoism. Yet we leave him as a bitter, cantankerous old man (Peter Capaldi) whose eventual marriage produced a son but no happiness or satisfaction. It’s a big jump and Davies’ screenplay leaves it to the viewer to infer how damaging Siegfried’s conformist choices to marry and convert to Catholicism turned out to be.
Yet as the extraordinary fixed frame, long-held final shot tells us (it is the only one of its kind in the film), the overriding life experience that changed the course of the poet’s life was the war. Throughout the film, Davies uses strong, sometimes unbearable repertory footage of soldiers marching in formation, manning tanks and guns, lying dead in fields, mutilated or dying in hospitals. A turn of the camera and Nicola Daley’s lighting changes from a well-appointed London residence to a black and white nightmare from the past. Davies and his technical team astonish us with their inventive ways of sneaking up on the audience when it’s least expected and thrusting them into the horror and brutality of the past, much as Siegfried’s mind must have done. These sudden visits to the trenches have their own terrible poetry that chills the soul. Often they are set to wildly contrasting music, like the daring use of the Old West cattle herding song “Ghost Riders in the Sky” over soldiers marching off to the Western Front.
We first meet Siegfried and his brother in 1914, as they come out of a performance of Stravinsky’s revolutionary Rite of Spring on the London stage. In the next shot, they walk cocksure into a recruiting office. His brother never comes back from the front, while Siegfried returns to write a declaration against the government’s refusal to end the war. It brings him within an inch of getting court-martialed. When he is brought before three angry officers, Lowden plays him with a callow show of bravado and arrogance, even though he’s right. He wants to read his letter in Parliament, but is saved, against his will, by the diplomacy of Robbie Ross (fine stage actor Simon Russell Beale), who was Oscar Wilde’s literary executor and who loyally refused to deny their relationship when Wilde was arrested. For those in the know, it is the first hint of coming to terms with one’s homosexuality, which will emerge as a major theme in Siegfried’s life.
But being saved from the firing squad comes at a price: he must go to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland as the victim of a “nervous disorder”, a term preferred by the military to conscientious objector. (For reference, it is the same place and time depicted in Pat Barker’s historical novels The Regeneration Trilogy.) There he enters into a kind of psychotherapy with the gentlemanly Dr. William Rivers (Ben Daniels), who to Siegfried’s surprise admits he’s gay.
He also befriends, and secretly falls in love with, the shell-shocked soldier Wilfred Owen (a touchingly reticent Matthew Tennyson). In a small scene, Owen shyly gives the already published Sassoon his poem “Disabled” to read. We do not (yet) hear it read aloud, but we watch Siegfried’s face as he silently reads it through, before declaring it magnificent. Davies withholds the poem’s heart-wrenching words until much later in the film when, after all that the hero has gone through emotionally, he can at last break down in tears.
Returning to London, Siegfried is drawn back into the high society he came from, and Davies delights in sketching characters like society queen and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell (Geraldine James) and Ivor Novello (a darkly handsome and petulant Jeremy Irvine). The latter was a songwriter and flamboyant musical entertainer who was hugely popular in his day, and who becomes Siegfried’s lover — until he callously drops him. Other men (Tom Blyth as the good-hearted Glen, Calam Lynch as a narcissistic but sincere Stephen Tennant) appear in his life; even the pretty blond Hester (Kate Phillips/Gemma Jones), who he marries much to everyone’s surprise. But nothing can bring him peace.
Clocking in at over two hours, the film is long but not self-indulgent, something not always the case with the director’s work. Alex Mackie’s editing is never boring and often impressively innovative in its juxtapositions of Siegfried’s post-war life and “the voices of the muffled dead.” Those would include Wilfred Owen, who was killed in battle just one week before the war ended.
Director, screenplay: Terence Davies
Cast: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Geraldine James, Kate Phillips, Jeremy Irvine, Gemma Jones, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Daniels, Anton Lesser, Calam Lynch, Tom Blyth, Matthew Tennyson, David Shields
Producer: Michael Elliott
Cinematography: Nicola Daley
Production design: Andy Harris
Costume design: Annie Symons
Editing: Alex Mackie
Production companies: EMU Films, Bankside Films, BBC Film (UK)
World sales: Bankside Films
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (competition)
In English
137 minutes
