Benediction

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Must watch!

source: Benediction

It was very enjoyable, especially on the challenges of being a survivor after WW1 when so many friends and comrades were lost. The period and values were well recreated with excellent performances. However the later scenes seem to play rather loose with the facts, suggesting he ended up in a semi in the suburbs still married with a stay at home son. Not according to Wikipedia!

The movie was developing ok for me. Nothing of of the ordinary in the portrayal of an extraordinary poet and war hero. Unfortunately for me, the scene where the two of the characters dance Tango.... sorry i just couldn't handle. I know that our beloved poet and awesome thinker and rebel with a cause had moments in his life when he was, well you know. We all know that. And that is perfectly ok. Absolutely fine and alright. Still, that scene prevented me to forward enjoying the flick. It was just like a switch that was on. And just went off. That is why i could not rate the film, as i did not finished. Sadly so.

As a gay man, I always enjoy movies that show how difficult gay men had it "back in the day." This movie, however, was just a mess. The story line was all over the place, the characters irredeemable, and not well thought out, all around. The showed moved all over the place, in reference to time frames (which movies love doing these days, but this one didn't do it well, at all). The movie went from acting to poetry to singing to showing random pictures of WWI while reading poetry. There were parts I really enjoyed, but for the most part it was just disappointing.

Dont bother with this one. Why did they make a film about a bunch of ghastly upper class intellectual snobs with no redeeming features and then only featuring the negative parts of their relationships- no real romance or affection? A bit of a mess really. The boys are all very pretty though.

The film was very disjointed, it felt like the actors had been asked to do improvisations of what they thought were the highlights of Sassoon's life, which were then cobbled together, with very little attempt to link them together. If you're familiar with the era, the name dropping was endless, however if you aren't there are no explanations of any of the relationships. Ivor Novello comes across as selfish and heartless and I couldn't see his appeal for someone who was so famous he has awards named after him, maybe it was originally supposed to be about him but he was portrayed as so unlikeable it was switched to a bio of Sassoon. I knew nothing of the film before I went apart from that Siegfried Sassoon was a first world war poet - 2 of his poems were read, Ivor Novello gets a couple of songs and Wilfred gets the final poem. In other words it doesn't bring SS works to a new audience. Over all it has very little to commend it apart from Peter Capaldi, who always holds the screen, I kept getting distracted during the long "artistic" pauses thinking Matthew Goode would be a better young Peter Capaldi. Considering SS was only married for 13 years, his wife must have had a hard paper round, as she aged at least 40 years in that time. Also his son wears what looks like the same long sleeved blue top for most of the passing years, in a time when men usually wore shirt and ties, still facts don't seem to be necessary for this film. Should have been called the gay life of Siegfried Sassoon as that seemed to be the main focus, with a few historical war films thrown in, possibly for context who knows! This film leaves you knowing as little about the poet at the end as it did at the beginning, not a good recommendation for a biography.