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. 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.
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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. 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.