Benediction. (12A.)
Directed by Terrence Davies.
Starring Jack Lowden, Simon Russell Beale, Calam Lynch, Jeremy Irvine, Ben Daniels, Geraldine James and Peter Capaldi. 137 mins.
A film about the celebrated First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon (Lowden) might reasonably be expected to concern itself with him writing poetry during the First World War. Terrence (Distant Voices, Still Lives) Davies's film about Sassoon gets through all that Great War business in the first twenty-odd minutes and without a single visit to a battlefield so that it can concentrate on Sassoon’s many more years not being a war poet. This is Sassoon being a bright young thing in London’s gay social circle, having his heart broken by Ivor Novello (Irvine), giving up and marrying a lady, becoming grumpy Peter Capaldi in his old age and converting to Catholicism.
The film’s opening is tremendous, introducing the subject with a clipped eloquence that cuts straight to the core with skilled and poignant use of period archive footage. But after around twenty minutes Sassoon, having heroically risked a court-martial to voice his opposition to the conduct of the war, is sent off to a military psychiatric unit and the film becomes one big yap factory.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a talky film, but much of this seems verbiage. Firstly there are long dialogue scenes between Sassoon and his doctor, (Ben Daniels, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Enoch Powell, particularly in profile.) Post-war is a whirl of social and theatrical engagements in the capital. Somewhere along the way, Davies has decided that levity is something he might gainfully employ. It worked well in A Quiet Passion; less so here. Everybody is frightfully witty, and witty in the most frightful ways. The unrelenting stream of putdowns and cutting remarks becomes unbearable: at least at the Somme the hostile fire only came from the opposite direction, here it can come from everywhere.
It's perfectly reasonable to make a film about Sassoon when he wasn't a war poet and to claim him as a gay hero but after the film, I was left wondering what drew Davies to him. The demi-monde of the closet gay in the 20/the 30s seems like a hateful world of catty entitlement; horrible enough to drive a man straight. Old Capaldi Sassoon is a miserable old grump, the archetypal Angry Young Man gone sour, moaning on about the horrors of this new fangled pop music. (This is a Davies hobby horse: in his narration to Of Time and The City the director was incredibly condescending about The Beatles, describing them as sounding like provincial solicitors.) Sassoon's bravery on the battlefield is ignored and instead he is shown as someone who made the lives of everyone he met miserable. For a final insult, the film concludes with a poem by the other great war poet Wilfred Owen.
Directed by Terrence Davies.
Starring Jack Lowden, Simon Russell Beale, Calam Lynch, Jeremy Irvine, Ben Daniels, Geraldine James and Peter Capaldi. 137 mins.
A film about the celebrated First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon (Lowden) might reasonably be expected to concern itself with him writing poetry during the First World War. Terrence (Distant Voices, Still Lives) Davies's film about Sassoon gets through all that Great War business in the first twenty-odd minutes and without a single visit to a battlefield so that it can concentrate on Sassoon’s many more years not being a war poet. This is Sassoon being a bright young thing in London’s gay social circle, having his heart broken by Ivor Novello (Irvine), giving up and marrying a lady, becoming grumpy Peter Capaldi in his old age and converting to Catholicism.
The film’s opening is tremendous, introducing the subject with a clipped eloquence that cuts straight to the core with skilled and poignant use of period archive footage. But after around twenty minutes Sassoon, having heroically risked a court-martial to voice his opposition to the conduct of the war, is sent off to a military psychiatric unit and the film becomes one big yap factory.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a talky film, but much of this seems verbiage. Firstly there are long dialogue scenes between Sassoon and his doctor, (Ben Daniels, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Enoch Powell, particularly in profile.) Post-war is a whirl of social and theatrical engagements in the capital. Somewhere along the way, Davies has decided that levity is something he might gainfully employ. It worked well in A Quiet Passion; less so here. Everybody is frightfully witty, and witty in the most frightful ways. The unrelenting stream of putdowns and cutting remarks becomes unbearable: at least at the Somme the hostile fire only came from the opposite direction, here it can come from everywhere.
It's perfectly reasonable to make a film about Sassoon when he wasn't a war poet and to claim him as a gay hero but after the film, I was left wondering what drew Davies to him. The demi-monde of the closet gay in the 20/the 30s seems like a hateful world of catty entitlement; horrible enough to drive a man straight. Old Capaldi Sassoon is a miserable old grump, the archetypal Angry Young Man gone sour, moaning on about the horrors of this new fangled pop music. (This is a Davies hobby horse: in his narration to Of Time and The City the director was incredibly condescending about The Beatles, describing them as sounding like provincial solicitors.) Sassoon's bravery on the battlefield is ignored and instead he is shown as someone who made the lives of everyone he met miserable. For a final insult, the film concludes with a poem by the other great war poet Wilfred Owen.
