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.