But the pleasures of such privilege - the companionship of friends, the expression of long-forbidden desires - also come with a corrosive aftertaste of confusion, betrayal and heartache. (They also inspire some commiseration with older mentors like the journalist Robbie Ross, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s played here by the excellent Simon Russell Beale.) One of the achievements of “Benediction,” as it drifts from Siegfried’s quiet family home in Kent (Geraldine James plays his warmly supportive mother) to the bustling theaters, restaurants and house parties of London, is to illuminate the pockets of privilege enjoyed by wealthy, culturally influential gay men in an otherwise repressive and inhospitable era. Those longings are occasionally sated by the many handsome, well-spoken young men who move within Siegfried’s artistic circle. But even by his standards, the story of a fellow gay English artist, even one locked away in an earlier era, touches resonant insights and unusual depths of feeling. To call “Benediction” a deeply personal film might thus seem unremarkable, since Davies seldom deals in the impersonal. What has united most of Davies’ dramas (excluding his masterful early memoirs, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes”) is a deep if understated identification with his protagonists, an ability to perceive - in the tragic destinies of women like Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” and Hester Collyer in “The Deep Blue Sea” - a shared alienation from the prevailing codes and mores of one’s era. (That much was already clear from “A Quiet Passion,” his splendid 2017 portrait of another great poet, Emily Dickinson.) And his formal approach - in particular the fluid, languid rhythms of Alex Mackie’s editing the stately, almost symmetrical widescreen images composed by the cinematographer Nicola Daley and a soundtrack that samples Stravinsky, the Gershwins and other music-hall staples of the era - would be hard to mistake for that of any other filmmaker.īut the singularity of “Benediction” arises from more than just a spirited rejection of Hollywood convention. It goes without saying that Davies’ insistence on this kind of emotional interiority - and his accompanying disinterest in expository montages and wildly gestural, prosthetic-laden performances - run counter to the strategies and priorities of the average mainstream biopic. Drifting between past and future, history and memory, “Benediction” captures the strange, specific alchemy by which contradictory fragments of identity assemble themselves into a soul. Through Lowden’s thoughtful, tender, quietly charismatic and finally anguished performance, we come to grasp not only Sassoon’s struggles with his sexuality, his art and his destiny, but also the unpredictable evolution of those struggles over time. And in the Scottish actor Jack Lowden ( “Dunkirk,” “Fighting With My Family”), Sassoon has found a most eloquent and empathetic interpreter. As a portrait of a gay man living in early 20th century Britain, it could scarcely be otherwise.
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Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials.īut “Benediction,” venturing well beyond the war years that fired Sassoon’s own poetic imagination, is about more than one kind of isolation. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Few filmmakers have Davies’ gift for evoking states of loneliness, and here he suggests the terrible isolation visited upon those who endured the horrors of armed conflict. Sprinkling passages of his poetry over somber reams of old war footage, “Benediction” is, among other things, a mournful tribute to the wounded and fallen, suffused with a particular compassion for those survivors who, like Sassoon, never shook off the trauma of what they experienced. His poem “Suicide in the Trenches,” first published in 1918, ends with this stinging rebuke:Ī decorated veteran of the Western Front before he turned conscientious objector, Sassoon knew of what he spoke.
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In furious, somber and, yes, frequently thrilling language, he laid bare the horrors of World War I and excoriated the moral blindness of its architects and supporters. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art.
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“Benediction,” Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure.