Terence Davies, the writer-director behind such modern classics as Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes and more recently Sunset Song, has long been one of the great poets of British cinema. It’s perhaps unsurprising therefore that his films have occasionally focused on the lives of poets: Emily Dickinson in 2016’s A Quiet Passion, and now Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction. Davies’s portrait of Dickinson was a heartfelt paean to a creative talent who went largely unrecognised in her own lifetime. His account of Sassoon’s tribulations (an inventively nonlinear collage of drama, poetry, music and archive) is more unforgiving, confronting us with a contradictory character locked in his own private hell – keenly attuned to the horrors of war, yet seemingly unable to change either himself or the world around him, whether through art or action.
Jack Lowden is perfectly cast as the younger Sassoon, a war hero who received a Military Cross in July 1916 for “conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches” on the western front. Yet Sassoon’s near-suicidal bravery (his comrades reportedly called him “Mad Jack”) covered a growing revulsion for the so-called Great War, boldly expressed in A Soldier’s Declaration (published in the press and read in the House of Commons) in which he accused his superiors of turning “a war of defence and liberation” into one of “aggression and conquest”.
