In Terence Davies’ “Benediction,” a moving portrait of English war poet Siegfried Sassoon, the blessing bestowed is both literal and cinematic. While older Siegfried (Peter Capaldi) receives a blessing from a priest while converting to Catholicism, much to the chagrin of his adult son, George (Richard Goulding), the true benediction of “Benediction” is much more than just the on-screen ritual. The blessing of the film is the film itself, and the extraordinary grace that Davies extends toward his subject, a poet who made his pain public but had to keep his intimate life private.
Sassoon is known for his searing antiwar poems that depicted the brutality of the trenches during World War I. When we meet young Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), a second lieutenant and already an accomplished writer, he has written a letter of protest refusing to participate in a war with whose political aims he no longer agrees.
Aided by his friends in the literary community, including mentor and former Oscar Wilde paramour Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), Siegfried manages to escape a court martial, and lands in a Scottish hospital for “nervous disorders.” It’s there that he will encounter and work with another noted WWI poet, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), and dare to open up about “the love that dare not speak its name,” his own homosexuality, which was at that time illegal in England.
