Benediction

  In this brilliant biopic of British poet Siegfried Sassoon several Sassoon poems are read over landscapes and war scenes. 

But the key poem is Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled.” It appears twice. At his first reading Sassoon finds it a brilliant advance from Owen’s earlier derivativeness. Here for the first time the poet finds his voice, his independence, his self-assertion and emotional freedom. But we hear it only near film’s end, amid the aged Sassoon’s looking back in remorse at a life marked by loss and his emotional paralysis. 

The title points to the film’s two central wars and their respective costs in humanity. The literal war is WW I. There Sassoon fought valiantly, then courageously campaigned against its unscrupulous and disastrous continuation. We see a range of the war’s consequent disability, physical, emotional and psychological.

The second war is the homosexual’s campaign to survive in a bigoted cruel world. Owen and Sassoon were both “disabled” by the war, Owen killed and Sassoon robbed of emotional fulfilment. Owen was Sassoon’s one great love. Because their’s was “the love that dare not speak its name” the two ardent poets’ sole physical exchange is the stiff handshake when Owen marches off to death. Sassoon never recovers from Owen’s loss.

With his usual eye — and heart — for the oppressed sensitive, director Terence Davies conveys the gay characters’ sentence to emotional crippling. That’s the second form of disability in these wars. When Sassoon is interviewed by the army counselor — who himself admits to being gay; “I trust you will be discreet” — they are shown primarily in alternating one-shots, defining the isolation imposed upon the forbiddenly compatible.     

Unable to fulfill his romantic nature Sassoon drifts into trivial affairs, with shallow rewards while they work and profound loss when they don’t. The successful poet is condemned to a failed emotional life.

Sassoon’s retreat into conventional marriage only spreads his damage, the corollary  costs of that war. We see the consequences of Sassoon’s frustration in his wife, when the ebullient Kate Phillips turns into the haggard Gemma Jones. The son is his own frustrated loner, of uncertain sexuality and stunted emotional connection. Sassoon’s desperate retreat into “normalcy” destroys his nearest as well as himself. That’s the point of the song cited from Stop the World I want to Get Off — a piquant satire of the “typically English.”

The doubled shadow of Owen’s “Disabilities” hangs over the film and Sassoon’s sad, sad life until the poem is finally heard. The film is truly a Benediction because it bestows upon the dead — and the living who remain with us — the blessing of acceptance and understanding that they were denied in life.