Review: 'Benediction' tells a poet's life story, with moments of graceful beauty and a lot of downtime

Like most movies directed by the British filmmaker Terence Davies, “Benediction” is a perfectly beautiful, graceful and heartbreaking depiction of a life — in this case, the poet and peace activist Siegfried Sassoon — and it also can be, depending on your mood and patience, something of a slog.

Sassoon — played in his younger days by Jack Lowden (“Slow Horses”) and in his old age by Peter Capaldi — is best remembered, where he is remembered, for his candid and stirring poetry based on his experiences as a lieutenant in World War I. Davies doesn’t show Sassoon directly in wartime, perhaps because there’s no budget for it, but uses documentary footage of the era and Sassoon’s words to convey the horrors of that war.

After writing a letter to protest the war, Sassoon is sent to a military psychiatric hospital — thanks to some backroom maneuvers by an old friend, Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), to keep Sassoon from facing a court martial and a firing squad. There, he confides in a psychiatrist (Ben Daniels), and finds companionship with a younger officer, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), who writes a poem that Sassoon declares to be “magnificent.”

Davies’ narrative bounces around a bit, merging young Sassoon’s grief over his younger brother’s death in the war with his older self’s late-in-life conversion to Roman Catholicism. After that, Sassoon’s story travels mostly in chronological order. 

At the end of the war and for years after, Davies’ script tells us, Sassoon engaged on a string of affairs with men — most notably the English actor and vaudeville singer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), who is as gorgeous as he is self-centered. Years later, he meets Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips), and they marry and have a son, but Sassoon’s hopes for a happy life are regularly thwarted by his memories of the war.

Davies (whose last movie, “A Quiet Passion,” featured Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson), is incapable of making a movie that doesn’t feature some transcendent beauty, and some of Sassoon’s moments thinking back on his past — with Lowden reciting Sassoon’s poems in voice-over — hit that mark. But there’s a lot of downtime, and catty bickering among Sassoon and several of his boyfriends, in between those moments of graceful wonder.

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‘Benediction’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for disturbing war images, some sexual material and thematic elements. Running time: 137 minutes.