Of all movie genres, the literary biopic is among the likeliest to come across as phony, mushy, or just plain dumb. It conjures images of the anguished author wringing words from the typewriter — think of Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman in Fred Zinnemann’s admirable but cliched Julia — or a kind of glib romanticism about the writer’s life, evinced in the perpetual popularity of movies about the Beats (including Heart Beat, starring Nick Nolte as Neal Cassady, or Kill Your Darlings, with Daniel Radcliffe, of all people, as Allen Ginsberg).
Terence Davies’s new film about the English poet and World War I fighter Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) artfully evades most of these pitfalls. Benediction, which stars Jack Lowden as Sassoon as a young man and Peter Capaldi as Sassoon as an old man, is not a literary biopic so much as a sustained wail of indignation. It serves as a testament to the talent and imagination of the maker of the masterpieces Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes.
The source of Sassoon’s rage, and the film’s, can be found in his service in the Army during World War I — an experience that, notwithstanding his displays of heroism and honor, left him in a state of profound disgust at a geopolitical arrangement in which leaders round up their young men, send them to battlefields, and spit out cripples and corpses. By tapping into Sassoon’s well of outrage, Davies gives his film a drive and focus lacking in other biopics of literary figures. Lines from A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” recited on the soundtrack — “Lovely lads and dead and rotten / None that go return again” — give the sense of a film tonally closer to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory than to the Gwyneth Paltrow movie about Sylvia Plath.
The film’s early passages offer a portrait of an artistic sensibility and moral conscience taking shape. Sassoon’s antiwar declarations invited accusations of treason. But thanks to clever maneuvering, the poet dodged a court-martial and was instead delivered to a hospital purportedly aimed at curing shell shock. It appears, in Davies’s telling, to have really housed dissidents wishing to save face, at least in part. (Wilfred Owen, the other great poet of World War I, was in residence at the same hospital, where he became pals with Sassoon; Owen was later killed in action.)
Among the film’s most affecting scenes are a series of duologues between Sassoon and a hospital psychiatrist (Ben Daniels). In the most delicate of exchanges, each man admits their homosexuality without so much as saying so out loud. “The world is full of anomalies,” the psychiatrist says. Davies, who is gay, sees Sassoon as a man forever set apart, with or without a war to rail against.
World War I grinds to an end, but Sassoon, as played by Lowden, remains intense, tightly wound, more passionate in his passions than mere mortals. Midway through the film, Sassoon attempts to sustain a romantic relationship with singer-actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine, in a performance that projects supreme wantonness and self-involvement) but discovers that the singer-actor is just a cavalier cad. “But I love you,” says Siegfried, to which Ivor replies, “You’ve said.” Meanwhile, Sassoon’s mother — one of whose other sons, Siegfried’s brother, lost his life in the Gallipoli campaign — speaks for the audience when she issues this verdict on her son’s lover: “He’s amusing but unpleasant.”
Sassoon’s other same-sex relationships end in disappointment, and in the film’s final act, Sassoon embarks on a heterosexual relationship with Hester Gatty (played in youth by Kate Phillips and in old age by Gemma Jones), whom he married and with whom he fathered a child, scientist George Sassoon. Yet Davies has a more interesting point to make than simply emphasizing the tragedy and incompleteness of a closeted life: The film shows that, no less surely than his fallen comrades in the Great War, Sassoon fails to hang on to the beauty and vigor of youth. He may have lived, but he has, with Hester, drifted into a bland, dull old age.
Peter Capaldi’s performance of a grouchy, graying Sassoon is a sight to behold: The old man shouts down his grown son (Richard Goulding) at one moment and coolly dismisses an old chum at another. Davies, whose earlier films demonstrate a love of both high and low culture, gives us the memorable sight of an elderly Sassoon attending a performance of the trivial Leslie Bricusse-Anthony Newley musical Stop the World — I Want to Get Off; the lead girl sings the silly ditty “Typically English.” What does Sassoon think of a show so out of step with his own aesthetic and generational sensibilities? Is he merely an old grump, or does he recognize that the youth he once tried to preserve, simply staying alive, is gone, gone, gone all the same?
To his eternal credit, Davies does not pretend to comprehend fully a man as many-sided and inscrutable as Sassoon, whose late-in-life conversion to Catholicism is touched on in just a scene or two and whose opposition to modernity is expressed in a fulmination against rock music. This film is not a full psychological portrait but an abstract impression of one human soul brutalized by a war of unimaginable violence. Davies ends his film with the most poetic scene in recent movies: a recitation of Owen’s poem “Disabled” — “He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark / And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey” — which is visualized as discreetly, subtly, and tenderly as the rest of this remarkable film.
Peter Tonguette is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
