Terence Davies' Benediction

I always want to love a Terence Davies movie. And they almost always have amazing ideas behind them, as if they're going to be headed in a beautiful direction. Somehow, I am always disappointed. I hate this because he's my friend Anthony's favorite director, and I always feel like I'm betraying him by being bored by Terence Davies.

It's his style. It's just not for me. Davies films all of his indoor scenes as if they're theatre. This is by design, at least I think it's by design (???). They're scenes that are supposed to feel haunted, not quite real, as if they're taking place in a character's memory, or perhaps Davies' own memory. But I just don't understand. Often when we are blessed with a scene that's set outdoors this goes away completely and one feels as if one is in the real world all of a sudden – there are one or two scenes like that in Benediction. But mostly I just felt as if I'd stumbled in on a scene in an acting studio.

The unfortunate thing is that the idea behind Benediction is so powerful and superb. It's also an attempted portrait at decadent gay life between the wars in the UK, a period not very well documented on screen. And yet, Davies has chosen in his protagonist – the poet Siegfried Sassoon – a kind of stick in the mud, someone who dislikes his contemporaries and can't seem to understand or live with the gay people in his life. 

And then he gets married...

It's a choice I find difficult to understand or forgive. This is bad morality on my part, of course, and I don't really feel superior to a gay man who decides to get married, but I also stop being interested in him the moment he does. He feels lost to me forever, gone from someone I could possibly identify with, someone with some hope for the future, to someone who has chosen to capitulate to a society that wants to crush him. This is, as I say, a bad moral position to take, and I don't approve of my feelings. I'm just being frank about them.

Anyway, the point isn't my questionable moral stance toward Davies' film, it's that I just found Benediction so oddly disjointed and distant. Even when Siegfried is supposedly in love or happy we seem to be granted only a stilted portrait of that, as if he never was really happy, and we are to be given no access to the fantasy that he might have been.

Davies has spliced footage and photographs from the Great War into this film, and almost all of that works very, very well. The film is at its best when it's about WWI. But mostly, actually, the film isn't about WWI. Instead it's a sort of exercise in frustration, a stumbling portrait of midcentury homosexuality, and one that seems to blame the midcentury homosexual himself for the unhappiness he inflicts upon himself and his family rather than the homophobic society that gave him that misery to begin with.

Jack Lowden is very good in this, and I rather loved Calam Lynch and Tom Blyth, as well.