Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Jeremy Irvine, Matthew Tennyson Gemma Jones, Julian Sands, Simon Russell Beale
Intro:
… evocative and lovingly detailed …
The poet Siegfried Sassoon was indeed twice blessed, with great literary talent and with the sort of deep educational opportunities that the English ruling class of his day could expect. Against that, he was unlucky enough to be propelled into the savages of the First World War, where fatuous out of touch generals threw men against machine gun fire to gain a few inches of mud.
In this film, ultra-English director Terence Davies has given us a lovingly-created sort of literary biopic. Sassoon was also gay, and the director concentrates upon the contradictions and evasions that this required in Edwardian England.
We first encounter Sassoon (sensitively played by Jack Lowden) when he has already served with distinction in the War. However, he has seen the horror and futility and it has affected his mind, or rather his nerves. He is lucid enough to tell the military board exactly what he thinks of the conduct of the war, but he is sent to a retreat/hospital in Scotland, nonetheless. There he meets the young Wilfred Owen (by common consent the best of all the First World War poets who died tragically a week before peace was finally declared). Owen (Matthew Tennyson) worships the older Sassoon, and they form an immediate homosocial and homoerotic relationship. Here, the stifling restraint only intensifies our sense of the love that dare not speak its name.
The middle of the film deals with Sassoon’s post war fame and his affairs with various men, including the much-feted composer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) who is portrayed here as a prize bitch. There are endless scenes of the languid decadence of this milieu, but it is somewhat at the expense of the forward motion of the film. At times, it seems to fall into a kind of Brideshead Revisited parody with beautiful young men in flannels swanning through stately homes. The final section shows the much older, and slightly culturally marooned, Sassoon (now played by Peter Capaldi) and his sometimes-fractious relationship with his only son.
Davies has been much praised for his slow, evocative and lovingly detailed depictions of historic England. He can tackle both ends of the social spectrum from his own background in working class Liverpool (Distant Voices, Still Lives) to high society. He has a beautiful eye and there are always shots from his films that are picture perfect [in Benediction aided by Australian DOP Nicola Daley). His sense of yearning – and not just in a rose-tinted nostalgic vein – also adds great emotional depth. This is a man who appreciates the small beauty of the everyday epiphanies and, for that among other things, his place in cinema history is assured. His latest will no doubt please his many fans even if it could have been trimmed slightly.
