'Benediction' Review: Terence Davies's Latest is a Somber Glance at the Pain Put Into Creating Art
Led by a confident performance by Jack Lowdon and a firecracker screenplay, Terence Davies delivers another fascinating portrait of a troubled artist.
Doubt lingers in the mind a lot when thinking about one’s place in the world. We, as humans, want to know all the answers to life’s unanswered questions, and when we don’t, we ponder what all of this means. In doing this, we turn to the artists in our lives to find meaning in everything around us. In Terence Davies’s Benediction, he explores the life of one of Britain’s most famed poets, and what it is like when the talents of this time face the existential crisis that shakes them to their core and motivates them to create works of art that move us all.
Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) is an up-and-coming poet who lives within modest means alongside his widowed mother. He is a man of dashing good looks and distinguished intelligence, with top marks in his class. But all his wants and desires are put on hold when he is called to serve in the army during the First World War. While he is a good soldier, follows all commands, and does what he is told, Sassoon can help but see the carnage that is going on around him, thus making him curious as to why the war needs to be fought at all. This curiosity leads to too many questions and thus he is brought in front of the top brass and forced to go to a psychiatric hospital to think over his crazy notions about the war and clean his mind of the notion that the fight they are in isn’t worth it.
Haunted by the death count that is building within WWI, Sassoon uses this forced assignment to find himself and his purpose in life. Scenes between Sassoon and his primary care physician Dr. Rivers (Ben Daniels) are some of the most fascinating of the film, as they dive into a verbal battle of understanding each other, thus figuring out that they are two men cut from the same cloth, two men struggling with the war around them, as well as being able to live the lives they want, considering they are two homosexual men forces to stay in the closet.
In staying at the hospital, Sassoon gets his first taste of love in another soldier, who is kind to him as they spend as much time as they can together before Sassoon and his muss are separated by their orders. As the war goes on, Sassoon begins to follow along enough to get out before more damage is done to his soul, and thus he starts writing about the pain and sorrow he feels and becomes a master poet of his time. With this new form of celebrity, a new world is opened to him, one of lust and riches that were never available to him before. In this, he becomes romantically involved with several men, who all seem to be temporary solutions to mend the heart of this gentle soul, with most of them ending in heartbreak and some never getting further than friendship. Might seem a little repetitive for some but it’s quite sad to see Sassoon watch other men get tossed away so he can be the new object of someone’s desire, only to have it happen to them within a matter of months. Once he goes on to live with friends or family, he feels out of place, as a man between two worlds that don’t accept him and love him for who is.
Thus, in order to not be alone, and to eliminate the further pain, he marries Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips), and they live a normal life together, have a son, and retreat to a small home in London, and he abandons his extravagant former life. This normal circumstance seems to be the logical choice for him, even if it means that he is forced to be with someone he isn’t attracted to. This makes him colder in his elder years, resentful of the life he chose. But as Sassoon becomes older (played brilliantly by Peter Capaldi), the more he becomes angry with the world around him passing him by, wondering what he really accomplished.
Benediction plays like a series of moments with Siegfried Sassoon, looped together in time by the ideas of loneliness, passion, fame, and regret. As we learn more about Sassoon, it becomes less about the important work that he made and more about the profound sadness one must’ve gone through in order to make the comforting art that soothes our souls when we are down. Lowdon is able to expertly balance Sassoon’s confidence and knowledge as well as his vulnerability to the point that he is extremely relatable. It’s one of the best performances of the year because it is the most human, lived in because you feel that this man has lived a full life, whether it is the one he wanted to live is up to us to decide.
Davies, known for being an expert storyteller with films like The Deep Blue Sea and A Quiet Passion, has conducted another screenplay that is cracking with explosive conversations about our place in the world, delicious romantic drama, and just enough melodically to have us in the palm of his hands. While the film can go on a bit too long and could’ve used more of the future Sassoon to balance out the younger version of the man, we get a full life of someone who was as flawed as we are. Benediction is a refreshing tender examination of how our artists love and hurt just like the rest of us and how sad it is when they have no one to turn to with the trials and tribulations of their circumstances.