This cannot possibly be a surprise

Shocking testimony! Surprise witness! A surefire distraction from the fact that Congress has yet to take any of the plentiful actions available to them to rein in the Supreme Court-!

The first two of those read like headlines from your average supermarket scandal rag; the last one, not so much. That's because the last one is actually true and the other two are trying to create something out of nothing. Today's "shocking witness", Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to former Trump chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sat in front of the January 6th committee to tell everyone precisely nothing of interest outside of a soap opera script and nothing that could in any way be a surprise to anyone who has actually been paying attention. Of course, that latter category tends to include less than 10% of humanity, so perhaps I can't really find this unusual, either. Everyone knew on January 6th, 2021, that Trump had organized a mob to attack the Capitol. We knew this. It was right there in front of us and there's been a mountain of evidence piled on top of that accusation since that day. That Hutchinson, an insider to the Trump cabal, albeit one of minimal importance, was actually willing to talk about it in detail is the only mildly extraordinary event that took place.

I'm honestly baffled by the number of people reacting to this as if it's any more shocking than anything Trump has done before and what he's done for the vast majority of his life. Anyone that has paid attention to this man-child's behavior can't possibly be surprised that he would be throwing a tantrum because his attorney general followed the law; because not enough people could get through the metal detectors for his pity party at the Ellipse; that he attacked his driver who wasn't willing to let him bask in the glow of his devoted followers by leading them to sack the Capitol. This is who he is. This is who he's always been. The last six years have been daily reminders of that very fact and, yet, people are still somehow shocked that he's not only not "presidential" or anything even vaguely close to it, but is an outright criminal, as he has been for most of his life. There was a steady stream of commentary about his criminal behavior while in office and the last two years have been a constant parade of a host of other actions and events that only reinforce that perspective.

Most are assuming that nothing will come of this and they're absolutely right. Nothing will come of this because the people controlling the institutions of power are interested in only one thing: preserving those institutions of power and their place within them. That means preserving the dignity of the office of President by not prosecuting a blatant criminal who once held that office and attempted to retain it by overthrowing those very same institutions. It's why the New York Times refused to call Trump a liar when that's what he clearly is. It's why the current AG, Merrick Garland, chosen for his status as a legal non-entity that the GOP might actually go along with on the Court until McConnell decided to refuse to do even that, isn't standing outside Mar-a-Lago right now with a battalion of FBI agents. It's why Biden and Congress aren't taking the blizzard of actions they can, quite legally, take against both Trump and the corrupted Court. All these people care about is preserving the façade that is the American version of "democracy" and that means not bringing those institutions into question. Again, anyone who's been paying attention should have begun to question them decades ago. But most people don't pay attention and, thus, here we are in the Weimarican Republic with our far more threatening version of the Beer Hall Putsch resulting in prison terms for precisely no one who actually matters. And it's because, in the grand scheme of things, those people matter and we don't. To quote one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time: "It's a big club and you ain't in it!" And all they care about is the club.

Lacking verse and rhythm

In 1996, The English Patient won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It beat out Fargo, Secrets and Lies, Jerry Maguire, and Shine; almost all of which were considered to be better films among the wider movie-going public, not only now with the benefit of hindsight, but when the awards were announced. But The English Patient was considered to be a prime example of "Oscar bait", not only because it was A SERIOUS FILM but also because it was English and, thus, escaped the veneer of being genuinely innovative (Secrets), being something that was funny as well as good (Fargo), or something that appealed to the general public (Maguire.) Patient was something that the academy members could laud as serious filmmaking in classical, serious style. I don't want to tar this week's film, Benediction, with that same brush, but Patient was the film stuck in my head when we walked out of the theater; not only because it took itself VERY SERIOUSLY but also because, like Patient, it's about war and the effects of war and if there's anything that mainstream cinema loves, it's taking that very serious topic and moralizing about it.

As it stands, Benediction is at least partially about moralizing on the existence of war, since it's a biopic about Siegfried Sassoon, who made a name for himself by writing poetry about the horrors of trench warfare at the Somme and how the British government was only too happy to toss more young men into the grinder in the name of absolute victory. Sassoon had the audacity to risk a firing squad to make his point about how the war was wrong. He was also one of the more prominent literary figures of the time who wasn't under threat of imprisonment like his hero, Oscar Wilde, for having the audacity to be gay. And it's that latter aspect that the film is mostly centered upon, despite its framing as a war movie about the war poet. Sassoon has a difficult time maintaining a lasting relationship and tends to slant that situation in the direction of others betraying him, but it's also obvious that his version of survivors' guilt makes him fairly tiresome to be around for any lengthy period of time. While others want to enjoy life, Sassoon struggles to accept that it's still happening when so many around him died.

That sounds like the makings of a good story and, if writer-director Terence Davies had chosen to limit the scope of his undertaking a bit, it might have been one. But instead we end up with a film that, like Patient, is too long, unfocused, and like Sassoon himself, kind of tiresome. In choosing to show us seemingly every relationship he had before finally giving up the social ghost and marrying Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips), the parade of passion becomes confusing, rather than compelling. While seemingly most head-over-heels for Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) before being abandoned, Sassoon then gets involved with Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth) for perhaps 90 seconds of screen time before shifting suddenly to Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) without any kind of build-up. Later, we see a much older Stephen returning to try to make amends for having departed Siegfried's company for a more vivacious German prince with the idea that Stephen, not Ivor, was the love of Siegfried's life. But we were given 20 minutes of story to tell us about how attached Siegfried and Ivor were and only a tenth of that for Stephen. It felt like we had missed something before the film was even finished. Indeed, that was evident from the very beginning, where Davies chose to depict Sassoon's late-in-life conversion to Catholicism and the personal struggles he had mixing his faith with his emotions by showing a few seconds of his son, George (Richard Goulding), shouting at him in a church. Perhaps we were supposed to read a biography of Sassoon before seeing the film so we'd know the impact of the key points of the story, despite their brief presentation?

Jack Lowden does a good job in the title role as a man struggling with both his place in society and the fact that he's still alive to try to find a place. Those are deep questions that certainly deserve a slow-paced and methodical portrayal to give them the gravitas that makes them feel genuine. But when we're tossed from lover to lover with the only emotional delivery being that of Sassoon's contempt for the world at not seeing things the way he does, that word "tiresome" springs to mind again. Like Patient, which departed from its source material to bring an element of mystery to a story that's otherwise lacking in it (and which was so obvious that it made the film even more dolorous), Benediction tries to pack so much of a complicated figure's life into a couple hours that it ends up feeling trite and repetitive, rather than significant. By the third (or fourth?) moment of being left by another man he was supposedly deeply in love with, the only response I could think of was: "Yes. We've seen this. Let's move on." Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad film. It's well-acted and may have been well-written before an editor got hold of it and assured Davies that you couldn't keep people in the theater for four hours. It just seems like it might've been better served as an HBO miniseries, where all the nooks and crannies of war, love, and faith might've been explored to their fullest extent.