Benediction

 Terence Davies' last film Benediction (2021) is a bio-pic about the British poet and memoirist, a soldier of the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon (1886 to 1967).  The subject matter will be obscure to most viewers and the movie, Davies' last film before his death, is disappointing. (Davies died in October of 2023). In his previous movies, Davies addressed homosexuality in rather reticent and oblique terms.  However, in this film, he approaches this theme in more explicit terms -- it's not clear to me that this is any sort of improvement or, even, esthetically viable.  There seems to be a component of self-loathing in Davies' depiction of homosexuals, a sense that things would be better if the protagonist were straight or, at least, able to pass for straight.  (Sassoon, for instance, marries, apparently, because other gay men of his generation did this -- possibly as a form of camouflage; but, because, for most of the film all of the male characters in the picture are openly gay, it's not clear what the fashion for heterosexual marriage is supposed to mean.)  Davies' stages some sex scenes and depicts the Gay milieu in satirical, even, scathing terms.  But it's fairly clear that this aspect of the movie doesn't particularly interest him except as a platform for bitchy, fantastically articulate repartee and, in some respects, the homosexuality of the principal characters is, more or less incidental to the film's broader themes.  Davies was a great director and readers interested in his work should watch his earlier films, all of which are masterpieces:  Distant Voices, Still Lives  (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), his documentary about Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008), and his two adaptations, the great House of Mirth (2000) with Gillian Anderson and Deep Blue Sea (2011).  Davies last three pictures, in my view, display a considerable weakening in his talents -- Sunset Song (2015) is grim, slow-moving and lugubrious, almost a parody of Davies' unique film-style; his picture about Emily Dickinson A Quiet Passion (2016) completely misunderstands the poet's sly wit and malice and, instead, focuses on Dickinson's illnesses -- it makes her into a misunderstood saint and denies the woman's agency and, even, dominance within her family circle.  Benediction is puzzling and stands in relation to Davies' other films as does Fassbinder's last movie Querelle with respect to his many other films -- Davies, like Fassbinder, clarifies the erotic inclinations implied in his earlier films, but not necessarily in a manner that enhances the picture's meaning -- in fact, by making something overt that was obviously implied anyway, I think Benediction is significantly weaker than Davies' earlier pictures, some of which are among the greatest movies ever made.  (The Long Day Closes is fantastically audacious, brilliant, and moving.)     

Siegfried Sassoon, as a  young man, seems to despise this father's profession of faith -- the older man has converted to Catholicism.  (It seems to me on reflection that this episode is a confusing flashforward or prolepsis -- we are apparently seeing Sassoon in 1957 converting to Catholicism; this sequence is badly mismanaged.)   He enlists in the military and fights as a courageous and loyal soldier in the trenches on the Western Front.  He is adored by his men.  But Sassoon perceives the war as a pointless and horrific exercise in futility and he writes an open letter condemning the war effort.  Summoned before a tribunal of three officers, Sassoon makes witty and epigrammatic replies to their questions -- his responses to the officer's interrogation are drenched in contempt.  (It would seem that imitating Oscar Wilde in this context would not be a good strategy.)  The officer's repelled by Sassoon's arrogant savoir faire send him to a Scottish hospital for shell-shock victims.  There Sassoon encounters a similarly witty and ultra-intelligent officer, similarly homosexual and discusses with him "the love that does not dare to speak it's name."  Also confined in the hospital is Wilfred Owen, the great World War One poet.  Sassoon has an affair with him and is shown dancing a tango with the wan young man.  Owen is returned to the front and killed a week before the War ends.  After the War, Sassoon knocks about London and begins a romance with the utterly loathsome Ivor Novello, a composer of light musicals.  (Novello must be fantastic in bed because everyone in the movie is hopelessly in love with him -- although the man is a completely vicious cad and shown to be without any redeeming values at all.)  Sassoon has a love affair with one of Novello's other suitors, a man named Stephen.  Stephen is unfaithful to Sassoon and spends a few months in Germany enjoying the affections of some Prussian and Bavarian ex-soldiers.  At this point, the film becomes quite confusing.  Sassoon, who spends about half of the movie, berating his lovers, is haranguing poor Stephen about being a narcissist (this is the pot calling the kettle black).  Suddenly, Stephen ages into a handsome old man while gazing worshipfully into his image in a mirror.  The film flashes forward and shows Sassoon as an embittered, extremely angry old man.  He denounces poor Stephen who doesn't seem like all that bad of a guy and refuses to reconcile with him.  By this point, Sassoon has been married for thirty years to a long-suffering woman that he courted on the rebound from his unhappy love affair with Novello.  Sassoon's wife is disenchanted with her noxious and bitchy husband and departs for Scotland.  Sassoon, then, spends his waning years denouncing and insulting his own son, George.  George takes the vicious old man to a musical which Sassoon hates with such a passion that it basically kills him. (The musical is Stop the World I want to get off.)  Sitting on a park bench, Sassoon as an old man morphs into the handsome young ex-soldier.  While vehemently emotional music plays, he grimaces and gurns, all the time remembering a poem by Wilfred Owen called "Disabled" that Sassoon proclaimed a masterpiece in 1917.  We see a horribly mutilated veteran shoved onto a porch to enjoy the gloomy English weather -- the poor guy has no legs.  As the poem is recited, Sassoon makes faces and, then, the picture fades to black.

Sassoon is portrayed as a wretched, self-hating and embittered old man.  Davies provides, at least, three explanations for the cruelty and viciousness of his hero:  Sassoon is envious of the fame enjoyed by T. S. Eliot and thinks he should have been knighted for his poetry; Sassoon is bitter about being homosexual and having to live his life in the shadows; or, most plausibly, Sassoon is a victim of World War One -- he has been psychically mangled by his experiences in the Great War (Davies' shows newsreels of soldiers with horrible facial wounds or mutilated corpses in the trenches); these experiences have induced in him a sort of hysterical post-traumatic stress disorder that has distorted and disfigured his entire life.  The problem with the film is that we can't be convinced that Sassoon is a genius, particularly when the poem afforded the most attention in the movie is by Wilfred Owen -- in fact, two of Owen's poems are central to the movie.  There's no doubt that Sassoon is a master of scathing insults and clever one-liners but these gifts are deployed to humiliate and insult others who don't always seem deserving of his wrath -- for instance, he taunts his hapless son George mercilessly and seems to die of pique when the poor man takes him to musical that he doesn't like.  He also acts like wretched bully with regard to his long-suffering wife.  The guy is so rampantly unpleasant that we don't really sympathize with him at all.  

The movie has only three or four sequences that invoke Davies' powers as a film maker.  There are some languorous pans to the right when music is playing and a bizarre interlude featuring "Ghost Riders in the Sky" -- apparently, intended as a symbol for the horror of World War One, but such a peculiar choice of music that it simply confuses the viewers.  There are many "They Shall Not Grow Old" newsreels in the film showing the Great War.  When Sassoon gets married, everyone in the pews is Gay, and the group of handsome homosexuals includes T. E. Lawrence, helpfully identified as "Lawrence of Arabia".  This is not a good movie, although it's reasonably interesting.  Watch Davies' other earlier films instead of this movie.