Benediction (The Movie)

 

"The moment passes, but the hurt remains," muses famous World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon in this intense, just-over-two-hour, British film exploration of his life and feelings, written and directed by Terence Davies. The young, sensitive, and sexy Sassoon of the war and post-war years is perfectly played by Jack Lowden, while the older, seemingly so much unhappier Sassoon is played by Peter Capaldi.

Interspersed with tragic war footage, the film zig-zags somewhat back and forth in time, making it occasionally a challenge to follow. In the first, perhaps more socially significant and emotionally compelling part of the film, the already somewhat noted young poet and decorated-for-bravery Second Lieutenant in the British army protests the prolongation of the war's senseless slaughter - as a result of which (instead of being court-martialed) the well connected Sassoon is simply sent to a war hospital. There, while exploring his feelings - "too afraid, too inhibited, shamed by an inner corruption" - with a sympathetic doctor, he meets and soon falls in love with a younger (and better) poet, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), who gets killed just before the war's end.

Most of the rest of the film follows Sassoon's sexual and romantic involvements in the upper-class, socially privileged, artistic, gay, "shadow life" subculture which he was part of in post-war Britain. In the shadow of the psychologically (but in the case of Sassoon and his friends certainly not materially) oppressive social norms of the time, Sassoon's ultimately unsatisfying romantic relationships with entertainer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and with aristocratic Stephen Tenant (Calam Lynch) get the most attention. Sassoon's famous relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II's nephew Prince Philipp of Hesse is alluded to in passing but not portrayed or explored - an unfortunate omission since the ups and downs of Sassoon's affair with the Prince mirrored and may help explain (perhaps better than the film does) some of Sassoon's feelings about and approach to sex and romance. (Sassoon's relationship with the Prince of Hesse ended after the prince's marriage to Princess Mafalda of Italy, but remained a long-term potential vulnerability for the prince as he rose - and then catastrophically fell - in Nazi politics and in Hitler's personal circle.)  Meanwhile, Sassoon's marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips and Gemma Jones), his troubled relationship with his son George, and his late-life conversion to Roman Catholicism at Downside Abbey are relatively superficially treated in the film compared to its investigation of his more intense - and heartbreaking - relationships with Novello and Tennant.

The film's ending summarizes the lasting emotional impact of the catastrophe that was the "Great War" with a powerful portrayal of Wilfred Owen's tragic poem - his "magnificent"  poem that "pierces the heart" - about a young disabled soldier, as sadly recalled by both the older and the younger Sassoon - whose name now is enshrined as one of the 16 great World War I poets in Westminster Abbey.