Film Pick of the Week: Benediction - Review by Yvette Huddleston

The film has a broad sweep – covering several decades of Sassoon’s life from the Great War to his late-life conversion to Catholicism in the 1960s. This is not a conventional biopic, however, far from it – and his story is told in a non-linear manner incorporating archive footage and monochrome photographs, adding into the mix eye-catching stylistic flourishes such as back-projection and super-imposed images to create the sense of a blurring of past and present. At the centre are two impressive performances from Jack Lowden as the young poet and Peter Capaldi as the older Sassoon. Lowden gets more screen time – and his portrayal is moving, thoughtful, layered and unshowy – while Capaldi makes every second of his brief appearances count.

The film opens with Sassoon’s famous 1917 stand against the senseless killing he was witnessing as a serving officer on the Western Front. Up to that point he had been an exemplary soldier, winning the Military Cross in 1916 for bravery on the battlefield. His letter to his commanding officer entitled A Soldier’s Declaration, also sent to the press, outlined his opposition to the war and the government’s handling of it. His assertion that the conflict was no longer “a war of defence and liberation” and had “become a war of aggression and conquest” caused outrage. Narrowly avoiding court martial, Sassoon is deemed unfit to serve and sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh to be treated for shell shock. There he meets young poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson) whose brilliance he recognises – and whose early death, just days before the end of the war, affects him deeply.

The film also charts Sassoon’s complicated personal life – there are unhappy affairs with playwright and composer Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Irvine), a monstrous narcissist, and with flighty, self-regarding socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch morphing into Anton Lesser), followed by his companionable but ultimately doomed marriage to Hester Gatty (played by Kate Phillipps, then Gemma Jones) which produced a son, George.

Davies has created a delicate, elegiac, at times almost unbearably sad, portrait of a talented writer, deep thinker and sensitive, wounded soul whose peace of mind, like so many of his generation, was cruelly robbed by a futile war.