Film Review: Benediction takes a deep dive into the life of war poet Siegfried Sassoon
Benediction stars Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, along with Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Kate Phillips, Gemma Jones and Ben Daniels.
★★★★★
‘Old soldiers never die; they simply fide a-why!’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in the poem , and (12A) suggests that the line was as much prophecy as satire.
The young Sassoon’s (Jack Lowden) life is well documented: the debonair foxhunting chap-about-town who goes off to fight in WWI chockful of naive idealism, and is so shocked by the horrors of war that he writes a letter of protest to the War Office and is afterwards confined to Craiglockhart suffering from ‘neurasthenia’.
Less well known, perhaps, are his later years: his public status as a poet diminishing by the year, the embittered Sassoon (now played by Peter Capaldi) converts to Catholicism, retreats into an austere silence and alienates himself from family and friends.
But while they are the broad strokes of Terence Davies’ film, that’s by no means all: Davies is less interested in Sassoon’s public persona than he is in what made the poet tick, and much of the story is invested in that portion of Sassoon’s life that was lived in the shadows.
A gay man at a time when homosexuality was criminalised, Sassoon also suffered with PTSD and a crippling survivor’s guilt — his brother, Hamo, was killed at Gallipoli during WWI — and found himself a man out of time and place in the company of post-war London’s ‘fine young cannibals’, as Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) puts it, a pleasure-seeking horde who thrive on hedonism, vanity and bitchery.
Jack Lowden lays down a career marker with his thoughtful portrayal of the multi-layered Sassoon, heading up a superb cast that also includes Simon Russell Beale, Lia Williams and Calam Lynch, with the latter stealing quite a few scenes as Sassoon’s histrionically self-absorbed lover Stephen Tennant.
(cinema release)
