Siegfried Sassoon – war hero, conscientious objector, pacifist, homosexual and, latterly, Catholic – has long been a rich seam to filmmakers, biographers and novelists alike. But the problem must surely be this: which seam in such a rich garment of a life does the creative mind hem to best effect? In Terence Davies’s latest biopic of the poet, Benediction, it is hard to tell which thread wins out. In a mélange of tableaux consisting of acted scenes edited by Alex Mackie, archival footage of the trenches showcased in symmetrical, widescreen images and superimposed poetic sequences set to the music of Stravinsky, Gershwin and music-hall staples by Ivor Novello, the young Sassoon emerges ebullient and questing from the barbed wire and mud of Picardy.
Davies has skill and form in the genre – his biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion (2016), proves as much – but it would take a very clumsy filmmaker not to bring such an august figure as Sassoon to life. This is largely because a great deal of Sassoon’s early life is hugely familiar to those even half aware of the cultural landscape of the Great War. There are the poppies and the disenchantment of war, the righteous, youthful anger of Sassoon’s stand against the bloodbath (famously read aloud in Parliament), and there is, of course, Wilfred Owen and plenty of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Happily for the viewer, all these elements take on a familiar patina in the opening scenes of the film; a narrative arc of the Great War that we have all been schooled in thanks to scholars such as Peter Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory, and the hugely talented novelist of our generation, Pat Barker, in her Regeneration trilogy – although perhaps not for much longer since Owen has now been removed from the school syllabus.
Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon with skill, conveying the isolation of the artistic life be it wreathed in success or failure, although Sassoon admittedly enjoyed much of the former in poetry and prose.
What singles Benediction out, thankfully, is the insistence upon the lesser-known aspects of Sassoon’s life, namely his late conversion to Catholicism in 1957. Understood in this context, the film could be a meditation on grace and fragility and the impossibility of achieving either against the backdrop of war. Peter Capaldi plays the senior Sassoon, first encountered in a moment of CGI transformation from young soldier to older man, sitting in a pew on the day of his reception into the Church. Here, Davies’s own narrative as lapsed Catholic and self-avowed homosexual creeps out from behind the directorial curtain. Why, Sassoon’s son George asks, would anyone convert to Catholicism, “when you can get permanence from dressage, without the guilt?” Why, indeed?
Davies has trodden this path before in his earlier trilogy, Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration. He asks how self-doubt, guilt and shame may be reconciled with the beauty and benediction of Catholicism. There as here, filmic answers to spiritual questions are opaque and hard to parse. Readers of these pages will be no strangers to the objections made to Davies’s rendering of Sassoon’s conversion, namely from his niece, Sister Jessica Gatty, a member of the Religious of the Assumption. Sister Jessica, who credits her own conversion with Sassoon’s influence, finds Davies’s interpretation wanting. “The redemption which he sought in many different ways and which he longed for, was found in the last decade of his life when he came home to Christ in the Catholic Church. He was transformed. I can witness to this, so I need to speak out.”
But if Benediction fails to present a hopeful – or even truthful – rendering of Sassoon’s conversion, maybe this is the point. For did not Sassoon see his life as underwritten by a desperate failure at every turn? Failure to take a moral stand against the war (sent away as he was to Craiglockhart for neurasthenia), failure to recognise his true sexual nature, failure to find the transformative sacrament of benediction in the autumn of his life. The closing scenes, set to a recitation of Wilfred Owen’s Disabled, underline just how warped and distorted a life can become when it is played out in the theatre of war.
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn.
This is not a film that will neatly hem or tie up the strange and torn garment of Sassoon’s extraordinary life, but it does make one want to revisit his poetry and prose anew, to glimpse the possibility, if not the reality, of the benediction that he sought.
Arabella Byrne writes for the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.