The war-scarred life of a British poet

 

    Few filmmakers are as deeply versed in sorrow as Terence Davies, the British director of such films as Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, and, more recently, A Quiet Passion. 

  A cinematic essayist and poet, Davies never entirely forsakes narrative but often transcends it, giving his work a reflective quality, the emotional weight of living as transients in a time-bound world. Davies knows the grief of understanding that time ultimately swallows us all. Davies’s films can be seen as invitations to mourn.

      On its surface, Benediction -- Davies's latest film -- might be called a bio-pic -- and in some respects it is. The movie tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, a poet whose conscience and outrage was formed in the trenches of World War I. 

    Struck by the brutality and barbarism of war, Sassoon deemed himself a soldier whose duty included preserving the lives of other soldiers. To make his point, Sassoon issued what he called A Soldier's Declaration. He withdrew from the fight in1917.

     A decorated soldier, Sassoon wasn’t a pacifist. He argued that young men were being sacrificed to a policy that needlessly prolonged the bloodshed. The politicians had made dying on the battlefield pointless.

    Davies deals with Sassoon's life as a morally outraged soldier and, later, as a disaffected poet and gay man who suffered disappointment and rejection in his personal life. 

    Jack Lowden portrays Sassoon as a young man and Peter Capaldi portrays the aging, embittered Sassoon. 

    Moving between Sassoon's youth and his later life, Davies creates moody scenes, sometimes punctuating them with real war footage, each a small plaintive statement. So many gone and for what?

    Sassoon's rejection of combat was followed by an enforced stint in  mental hospital where he met and developed deep feelings for Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), another poet. Ordered back to the front, Owen had the misfortune of being killed on the battlefield a week before the war-ending armistice was signed. 

    Davies devotes considerable attention to the gay circle in which Sassoon traveled after the war. In addition to popular entertainer Ivor Novelllo (Jeremy Irvine), Sassoon had relationships with socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) and actor/theater director Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth). 

    A gay man himself, Davies idealizes little about gay life in the 1920s and '30s. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain during most of Sassoon's life but the small gay community Davies depicts was no blissful haven. Cruelties were not uncommon and many of the characters unleash  them with lacerating wit.

    Sassoon eventually married. He found a woman who had no illusions about who he was -- Kate Phillips as a young bride and Gemma Jones as Sassoon's older wife. Perhaps Sassoon felt marriage would give him respite from the whiplash ferocities of life among the gay social elite or maybe he was looking for stability.

    Lowden has the easier task of portraying the young Sassoon. Capaldi must play a mean-spirited poet who battles with his son George (Richard Goulding). An aggressively skeptical George wondered about his father's late-life conversion to Catholicism; Sassoon evidently believed Catholicism might help him find  permanence in a world full of kaleidoscopic shifts.  

  It's always dangerous to look for the creator in the creation, but many have suggested that Davies, or at least part of himself, resides somewhere inside this story. I’m not sure it matters.

  I can't say that Davies brings Sassoon fully to life as a writer but as has been the case with much of Davies work, Benediction is at its best when it tries to hold the ever-vanishing past close, fixing it in art and memory. A futile pursuit perhaps but Davies imbues it with elevating sadness and beauty.

 

      

     

'Stonewall' shortchanges realty

Roland Emmerich makes a film about the birth of the gay rights movement.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 are credited with having ignited America's gay rights movement. The riots were triggered by an early morning police raid of The Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned Greenwich Village bar that was patronized by transgender people, homeless gays, gay prostitutes, a portion of the lesbian community, as well as by gays simply looking for a place to meet.

The riots, which extended over several nights, are the ostensible subject of director Roland Emmerich's Stonewall, a movie misguidedly built around a fictional clean-cut Midwesterner who arrives in New York for what's made to look like a crash-course in gay life.

About now, you may be asking, "Emmerich? The director known for mega-movies such as Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 B.C., and White House Down? That Roland Emmerich?"

The answer is yes, and although Emmerich deserves credit for changing his disaster-movie pace, the resultant film is hampered by a decision to build its drama around Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a gay Indiana kid whose football-coach father (David Cubitt) banishes him.

Danny's small-town downfall culminates when he's caught having sex with the team's quarterback (Karl Glusman), an ambivalent young man who falsely insists that Danny got him drunk and seduced him.

A heartbroken Danny heads to New York City in hopes that he can enroll at Columbia University, where he has a scholarship waiting -- providing his parents send in the necessary papers.

Danny quickly falls in with a scruffy crowd on Christopher Street, characters who introduce Danny to the unforgiving rigors of street life, which for many of them involves prostitution.

Principal among these street waifs is Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), a Puerto Rican kid who falls for Danny. Ray fantasizes about making a home with Danny, but he's stuck in a life in which dreams never come true.

Ron Perlman shows up as Ed Murphy, the guy who operated the Stonewall. Murphy, the movie tells us, also pimped defenseless young men to wealthy homosexuals.

Danny eventually finds himself torn between a sexy but stalwart member of the organized gay community (Jonathan Rhys Myers) and the street kids represented by Ray. Tension develops between those who want to legitimize protest and those who wind up throwing bricks.

Emmerich may have wanted to give the movie a main character with whom mainstream audiences more easily could identify. But by turning Stonewall into Danny's story (complete with flashbacks to Danny's stifling high school days), Emmerich shortchanges the political cauldron out of which the gay rights movement arose.

Moreover, John Robin Baitz's overly schematic screenplay tends to squeeze the humanity out of most of the characters surrounding Danny.

Emmerich captures some of the turbulence of the '60s, a period in which life could feel as if it were coming apart at the seams, but there's a faux quality to Stonewall, perhaps because its drawn in such emphatic strokes that it can feel almost cartoonish.

'War Horse:' sentiment at full gallop

Steven Spielberg gives great spectacle in War Horse, but the sentimental notes may be sounded too loudly.

First, it was a book by Michael Morpurgo. Then it was a play by Nick Stafford, a theatrical showpiece that featured giant horse puppets. Now, it’s a movie by Steven Spielberg.

We’re talking about War Horse, a movie that makes maximum use of Spielberg’s talent for spectacle, as well as his penchant for pouring on the sentiment. I prefer the spectacle to the sentiment, but the mixture probably will result in one of the season’s most crowd-pleasing entertainments, a story held together by (as the title suggests) a horse.

How can you not feel sympathy for a horse that finds itself in the middle of some of the most horrific battles of World War I, at one point tangling himself in barbed wire on a scarred battlefield? It's one of the most agonizing sights you'll see this season, and Spielberg plays it for all it's worth.

Spielberg, of course, includes humans in his movie, as well, though none evokes as much emotion as the horse.

The story begins when Ted (Peter Mullan) outbids his landlord (David Thewlis) for a horse. Ted’s son (Jeremy Irvine) takes over care of the horse, which is more suited for running free than for the drudgery of farm work.

But Irvine’s Albert, who names the horse Joey, harnesses the horse’s energy and even proves that Joey can plow a rugged English field, an act of equine will that saves the family farm.

When war breaks out, Ted decides to sell Joey to the Army, and the movie becomes Spielberg’s foray into World War I. For his part, Albert pledges he will find Joey and return him to English pastures.

Once he becomes part of the military, Joey falls under the care of a strong but sensitive officer (Tom Hiddleston) – and the movie quickly breaks into episodic chunks, including a picture-slowing interlude in which Joey winds up in the care of a French grandfather (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens).

Of course, Albert eventually matures enough to join the British Army, which gives Spielberg a chance to show the kind of trench warfare that dominated that conflict. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski contrast the grim horror of war with the bucolic opening scenes, and there's no denying that some of the footage (horses pulling a huge cannon, for example) is both astonishing and sad.

And to make sure that we understand the humanity of both sides of the conflict, there's a scene that emphasizes the fact that the British soldiers and their German counterparts aren’t as different as they might believe themselves to be, the movie's can't-we-all-get-along moment. (Joey, it should be noted, falls into German hands at on point, and is pressed into service for the German army.)

Did I feel my heart strings being tugged at? Yes, but War Horse can seem so eager to connect with mainstream audiences that it loses some of its luster. There’s no denying Spielberg’s skill, but War Horse tries (too hard, I'd say) for the kind of epic grandeur that John Ford achieved when filming the American west.

War Horse boasts a dazzling display of craft; it's a horse-drawn tearjerker, the kind of old-fashioned movie that offers loads of big-screen reassurance no matter how harsh its content becomes. So I'm a little mixed on War Horse, which can be breathtakingly beautiful and ... well ... distressingly Spielbergian.