Movie number 25 of 2022
Movie: Benediction
Cinema: The Rivoli, Camberwell
Stars: 3.75
Another film firmly in the "not everybody's cup of tea" bucket. Benediction is pretty much everything I love in a good English film and more, but for the masses, yeah, not so much. I loved it. Many others wouldn't. And this is okay.
Benediction looks at the life of Siegfried Sassoon, the English War Poet, both as a young man battling his demons, and again, later in life, where he finds himself trying to reconcile himself with his past.
Sounds a bit glum? It is to a point, but the subject matter is looking at the life of a sensitive poet, subjected to service in the Great War at the Western Front who comes down with shell shock, it's not the going to be the most uplifting of topics.
The other big tip off is the writer/director, Terence Davies, is king of the pictoral interior monologue, with movies like A Quiet Passion, The Deep Blue Sea, The House of Mirth, and Distant Voices, Still Lives. Davies is not a director of vapid rom-coms. I remember a friend coming out of A Quiet Passion wanting to slit her wrists.
Thankfully, this is not as grim as that.
But what it does show is one man's struggles with his situations., Jack Lowdon is excellent as the younger version of Sassoon, both as the shellshocked soldier, and later, as a man living and loving in the shadows of the 1920s, when homosexuality was frowned upon and open secrets were kept.
Cutting over the story is some of Sassoon and Owen's poems and graphic images of the Western Front trenches. As somebody who studied these at high school, they added to the gravitas, and familiarity of the film.
Peter Capaldi takes up the reins as the older version of Sassoon, divorced from his wife, wondering about the meaning of life and on the verge of converting to Catholicism for its stability. Gone are the days where he was ladding about Mayfair with the other Bright Young Things.
There are some notable performances amongst Sassoon's friends and lovers. Matthew Tennyson gives gravitas to Wilfred Owen, Sassoon's fellow poet who he meets at an Edinburgh sanitorium. You just want to tell Siegfried to run as far as he can from the nasty Ivor Novello, wonderfully played by Jeremy Irvine. Calum Lynch is luminescent as Stephen Tennant, a long standing friend and lover, and I'd pay money just to watch him again.
There are a number of other British cinema luminaries in the cast - Geraldine James, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels, Julian Sands, Anton Lesser - just to name a few. They round out what is a solid British affair.
This film is currently in the art house cinemas and it probably won't have a long run. There was only myself and one other in this early screening.
I really liked it, but I know that this isn't everybody's sort of film. But it is a very good film about the futility and horrors of war and it's ongoing repercussions.
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