Cause and Effect 

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• Roadside Attractions

Real human lives are more complicated than movie lives; it shouldn't need to be said, yet it always bears keeping in mind. Movie biographies generally need to reduce, reduce, reduce to create a demi-glace of experience, and in the process can over-simplify everything. It was all about her relationship with her mother! Or her husband! That one traumatic event defines everything that came afterward for our hero! And so on.

Terence Davies is one of the most talented filmmakers of the past 40 years, yet he's facing a unique narrative challenge in something like Benediction. In capturing the story of real-life British poet Siegfried Sassoon, Davies was going to have to wrestle with two crucial components of Sassoon's experience: his time as a soldier during World War I, and being a closeted homosexual. Is it possible to paint a human portrait with enough nuance that it's clear what part of which of those things shaped who he became?

Benediction opens in 1914, with young Siegfried (Jack Lowden) preparing to head off to war with a casual enough manner that it appears he's more concerned about the cut and stylishness of his uniform than anything else. Yet eventually Siegfried is moved to make a statement criticizing the British government's prosecution of the war, and manages to dodge a court-martial only by being committed to a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh. There, Siegfried continues pursuing his writing, along with fellow poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), and also where he acknowledges for the first time his struggles with "the love that dare not speak its name."

In a sense, this is Davies' second version of a very similar kind of film biography—following his 2016 Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion—about an emotionally isolated poet wrestling with unconventional views on relationships and sexuality. Both could be viewed as ways for Davies to wrestle in his art with his own publicly-stated conflicted views about his own homosexuality, and Benediction spends plenty of time exploring Siegfried's various relationships, most notably with composer/actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and his tubercular companion Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch). Yet neither of those relationships is quite as compelling on screen as Siegfried's sessions with his therapist, Dr. Rivers (Ben Daniels), during which an unexpected spiritual kinship emerges. Atypically for Davies, it sometimes feels like he's running through a checklist of relationships he needs to portray, rather than finding the nugget of the character that is most intriguing.

A lot of that most intriguing material deals with Siegfried's PTSD-before-it-was-called-PTSD. Davies' filmmaking gifts are on best display during the sequences when he illustrates Siegfried's war poems with archival footage of soldiers in the trenches, or as stacked corpses. In theory, the haunting wartime experiences that drove Siegfried to risk being executed as a deserter should drive much of what comes later, except that the middle hour of Benediction finds that idea disappearing almost entirely as the narrative moves through his various lovers on the way towards his eventual marriage to socialite Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips).

That tension between the two driving forces on Siegfried's psychology grows even more complicated when Davies occasionally flashes forward to Siegfried in the later years of his life (played by Peter Capaldi), including a conversion to Catholicism and a difficult relationship with his son, George (Richard Goulding). The Siegfried that we see during those scenes is deeply unhappy, seemingly incapable of interacting with anyone else, but Davies isn't particularly keen on connecting the dots to make it clear how much of that unhappiness is connected to war trauma, and how much of it is connected to denying his sexuality.

Of course, a neat and tidy answer shouldn't be necessary, and it's not the only thing going on in Benediction This is a beautifully crafted film, full of sly bits of dialogue as Siegfried interacts with the witty set of Jazz Age England. And the performances are uniformly terrific, notably Irvine's caddish Novello and Daniels' kindly doctor. As viewers, however, we long for a sense of understanding the characters who are presented to us, even if that understanding is an oversimplification. Benediction closes on Siegfried alone on a park bench, collapsing into tears. Is he crying over lost lives? Lost loves? A little bit of both? There are probably no easy answers there, but it's hard not to want a little more answer of some kind.