Terence Davies (2021)
I happened to arrive for this London Film Festival screening of Benediction just as Terence Davies and his BFI minder were entering the building. Welcomed onstage before the film began, Davies was greeted with gales of cheering applause, which he acknowledged in theatrically humble little bows. In his words of introduction, he told us that, for him, cinema was all about the audiences who came to see his pictures. I wasn’t sure I believed this and was sure I didn’t believe the assertion he then made about how hard it was getting a film made ‘especially in this country’. (The Iranian director Jafar Panahi, for example, might not believe it either.) Davies’ Emily Dickinson film, A Quiet Passion (2016), was miles ahead of the other work of his I’d seen. Dramatising a poet’s life had brought out the best in him once before so it was only natural to hope this Siegfried Sassoon biography might do the same. It doesn’t, though the best bits are strong enough to intensify frustration with the film as a whole.
Benediction opens in 1914 with Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden) and his brother Hamo (Thom Ashley) in a theatre, excitedly watching a performance of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s working title for the piece was ‘The Great Sacrifice’ and the narrative moves quickly on to the Great War, from which Hamo never returned (he was killed at Gallipoli). Davies doesn’t reconstruct life in the trenches; he relies instead on archive footage of the carnage, accompanied by Jack Lowden’s voice reading Sassoon poetry. Davies’s choice of archive film is even more powerful than you might expect and Lowden reads well, here and subsequently – getting beyond Poetry Please hushed reverence into something more urgent and penetrating. In the film’s next episode, however, which deals with the aftermath of Sassoon’s anti-war stand in 1916-17, warning signs of how Benediction is going to develop, start to emerge.
His statement ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’, which Sassoon sent to his commanding officer, was leaked to the press then read out in the House of Commons by a sympathetic MP, and widely regarded as treasonous: Sassoon was spared a court martial through being declared unfit for service and referred as a patient to Craiglockhart war hospital near Edinburgh. Davies stages a confrontation there between Siegfried and a medical board in army uniform. Its members overact to a man; Jack Lowden declaims back at them. The acting loosens up briefly in Siegfried’s hospital interviews with the neurologist and psychiatrist W H R Rivers, well played by Ben Daniels (despite the combination of his face and hairstyle suggesting a benign Enoch Powell – if that’s not a contradiction in terms). As he makes clear in carefully chosen words, Dr Rivers is, like Siegfried, homosexual. So is another Craiglockhart patient, Wilfred Owen (the unprepossessing Matthew Tennyson). The intimacy of the scenes between the two poets – dancing a tango, swimming together underwater – seems meant to suggest that, during their time together in the hospital, Sassoon developed feelings for Owen that proved seminal.
Some of the bits involving Owen are confusing, though – in particular, the sequence in which a music hall singer performs ‘(There Was I) Waiting at the Church‘, to an audience of uniformed soldiers. This seems to be happening at Craiglockhart (it’s certainly not in a theatre) though all the soldiers look hale and hearty, and all bar Owen and Sassoon join in the chorus with gusto. Then Wilfred also starts to sing, further isolating the unsmiling Siegfried. Is the young men’s enthusiastic joining in meant to represent a generation’s tragically enthusiastic joining up, with Sassoon now a lone objector? Is the idea to ‘express’ his poem ‘Everyone Sang’ (which the scene certainly doesn’t do)? Or is Terence Davies simply indulging his well-known enthusiasm for community singing? Benediction includes one decidedly non-realistic interlude that is vividly effective: to evoke the idea of soldiers as livestock to the slaughter, Davies shows grainy monochrome of spectral cattle herds, scored to the dramatic, anachronistic ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’. But that music hall scene is situated in stylistic no man’s land. When Owen, having returned to France, dies in action a week before the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, Sassoon imparts his thoughts on the soundtrack. Jack Lowden has no other such voiceover (as distinct from reading poems) at any stage – you wonder who Siegfried thinks he’s talking to.
‘They shall grow not old …’ – but members of the cast do, repeatedly. A Quiet Passion’s highlights included CGI whereby the face of each member of the Dickinson family aged and, in three cases, changed seamlessly from that of a younger actor into an older one. It’s hardly surprising that Davies has taken a liking to this visual sleight of hand. The Craiglockhart section also sees the narrative jump forward for the first time. Siegfried wanders into a church where he sits looking numbly uncomprehending. Jack Lowden then morphs into Peter Capaldi, as the septuagenarian Sassoon, seated in a different house of prayer and on the verge of conversion to Roman Catholicism. In A Quiet Passion, the characters’ aging was expressively irreversible: the change locked them, Emily especially, into their older selves. In Benediction, however, Davies soon reverts to the younger Sassoon, who has far more screen time than the older version. Late on in the film, the face of Siegfried’s former lover, the Bright Young Thing Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), is transformed into the senior citizen (Anton Lesser) who pays a call on the elderly Sassoon and his wife Hester (Gemma Jones). By now, senescence-before-your-very-eyes is beginning to feel like the director’s party trick.
In the first scene featuring the old Sassoon, his son (and only child), George (Richard Goulding), sits a couple of pews behind him in the otherwise deserted church. It’s announced immediately, not to say over-emphatically, that the son takes a dim view of the father’s late-in-life embrace of Christianity – so dim it’s surprising he’s chosen to enter a church to make these feelings known. They are evidently shared by Terence Davies, who, as he recalls in the autobiographical documentary Of Time and the City (2008), was raised Catholic but realised that religion was ‘a big lie’. Once a priest (Jude Akuwudike) has delivered his words of welcome to the fold, Davies takes the view that the less said about his protagonist’s piety the better. He presents Sassoon’s religious faith as an eleventh-hour act of bad faith which takes over from a more sustained evasion, of his sexual nature.
Sassoon’s romantic life is a major element of Benediction and another muddled one. (It might be termed ‘complex’ rather than ‘muddled’ if Davies handled it subtly but this he fails to do.) It’s to be expected that a present-day film-maker, particularly an openly gay one, will want to show regret for the way Sassoon felt compelled to live his life, and to contrast this with members of his circle who did less to disguise their sexuality. But Benediction shows the unrepressed in a negative light. Davies concentrates on three of Sassoon’s affairs in the 1920s and early 1930s – with Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth) and Stephen Tennant. Siegfried’s mother, Theresa (Geraldine James), after her first meeting with Novello, asks if Ivor is another of ‘your pretty boys’; her son insists it’s much deeper than that. This may reflect wishful thinking on Siegfried’s part – at any rate, it’s hard to see depth in the relationship, over the course of numerous scenes between him and Novello. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Siegfried asks his mother and Theresa concedes she doesn’t – he’s ‘amusing but there something cruel’ about him. Jeremy Irvine is so at pains to stress the cruelty that he’s not even amusing. It’s more of the same when coquettish Stephen Tennant joins the story: you get the instant physical attraction but not what serious-minded Siegfried continues to see in his lover.
This interpretation of Ivor Novello may well be a travesty. When Bobbie Andrews (Harry Lawtey), appears on the scene, this new boyfriend of Novello is presented as flavour of the month; if Wikipedia is right, he and Andrews were partners from 1916 until Novello’s death in 1951. Glen Byam Shaw, like Sassoon, became a husband and father and, like Novello, had an enduring life partnership (he was married to Angela Baddeley for close on fifty years). In Benediction, Shaw comes off better than either Sassoon or Novello, albeit through failing to register much at all. Thanks to clumsy direction, Sassoon’s matrimonial project comes across as ridiculous from the start: no sooner has the possibility of marriage been mentioned than Davies cuts to Siegfried meeting Hester Gatty (played as a young woman by Kate Phillips). The whirlwind courtship that ensues may reflect Davies’s essentially dismissive view of Sassoon’s going straight though he does at least acknowledge that Hester is well aware from the outset of the sexual preferences of the man she’s fallen for.
Siegfried defends the relationship as ‘deep and decorous’, which rings true, thanks to Jack Lowden’s convincing playing of the proposal scene with Hester. There is more emotional depth here than in any of the exchanges with the men in Siegfried’s life. In actual fact, he and Hester married in 1933 and separated in 1945. In Benediction, the separation – Hester’s virtual banishment from the marital home – occurs much later, when Siegfried and the couple’s son look the same age as in that bad church scene. Hard to say why Davies adjusts the biographical facts in this way. Perhaps he feels prolonging the marriage helps to reinforce the damage done by living-a-lie. Perhaps he just reckoned that a high-class actress like Gemma Jones needed a big scene to make her appearance worthwhile.
In the early stages, Davies’s use of World War I archive material and eschewal of reconstruction seems like an act of humility. It’s if he’s saying: this is how it was – I can’t begin to compete with the truth of these images, or of war poetry informed by personal experience. Occasional inserts of archive film and poetry later on are a different matter – Davies is using the devices to remind not only the viewer but also himself of the War’s persisting influence on Sassoon, which the film otherwise fails to explore. That’s its chief weakness and disappointment. There’s no sense of whether or, if so, how Davies thinks the psychological legacy of the War informed Siegfried’s subsequent love life. It would be something if Benediction suggested, for example, that seeing so many lives end prematurely on the battlefield led Sassoon to embrace carpe diem promiscuity. Instead, this persistently melancholy figure seems merely incongruous in the glamorously bitchy company of Novello, Tennant et al. Something is eating at Siegfried but Davies’s implication that it’s predominantly homosexual guilt undermines the importance of what the protagonist saw and suffered in the War. This persists even into the last part of Benediction. Peter Capaldi’s ravaged face and raspy voice impressively convey a lifetime of exhausting psychic turmoil but the scenes he appears in deal almost exclusively with the death of Siegfried’s marriage. You can only infer therefore that the cause of the turmoil was his sexuality.
Despite his reputation for miserablism, Davies seems rather to enjoy parading cultural celebs in ‘the years of l’entre deux guerres‘, including usual suspects Ottoline Morrell (Suzanne Bertish) and Edith Sitwell (Lia Williams), as well as Sybil Colefax (Joanna Bacon). Each appears in a single sequence; the actresses concerned understandably make the most of it. Scene after overplayed scene in Benediction had me wondering again if Davies just isn’t a very skilled director of actors. Apart from Ben Daniels, there’s only one really satisfying supporting performance: Simon Russell Beale creates a witty, well-judged portrait of Sassoon’s well-connected friend Robbie Ross. It’s a reminder that this actor was the best reason for seeing Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea (2011). You can’t help wondering if Russell Beale succeeds in spite, rather than with the help, of the man behind the camera.
It’s good to see Jack Lowden in a starring role but the character of Siegfried remains frustratingly opaque and muffled, thanks to the script. Lowden has fine moments, even so, and the finest comes right at the end of Benediction. The younger Sassoon sits alone, reflecting on the death and horror of the war he’s been through. Terence Davies resists the temptation for a last CGI-morph into Peter Capaldi. The camera stays on Lowden’s stricken face, and he keeps – wordlessly and wonderfully – finding more to express. The soundtrack accompaniment of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis reinforces the emotional punch of Davies’s parting shot. In the course of the film, Lowden reads poetry by Owen as well as Sassoon, most notably ‘Disabled’, and it’s Owen’s ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War’ that, without being spoken, finally comes to mind. Benediction might have been better if its subject had more centrally been ‘War, and the pity of War’ but its conclusion not only enables the lead actor to go out on a high but is a boon to the film as a whole. The closing two minutes are better than the 135 that precede them. When an audience leaves the cinema with a strong finale uppermost in their minds, it may lead them to reflect favourably on the entirety of what they’ve been watching. Last impressions can count for a lot.
16 October 2021
