Movie Review: Benediction

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A+

A top-notch biopic of British poet, Siegfried Sassoon. 

This is simply a beautiful movie. It offers a complex portrait of a complex human being. It shows both his virtues and faults in an unmistakable way. The film neither makes him the hero or the villain but simply a human being trying to deal with an emptiness inside of him. Though he tries to escape from this through poetry and meaningless affairs that emptiness is still there. This is something that any of us can relate to. Most of us have felt an unexplained emptiness sometime in their life and felt unable to fill it. This deals with that problem in a very intelligent way that offers us food for thought as we leave the theater. Meanwhile this film also gives us an intelligent look at such subjects as being a solider who feels morally opposed to his orders. The movies also has some of the sharpest and best written dialogue I have heard in a modern movie in quite sometime. There is a real All About Eve style wit to much of this dialogue. Much of which is sharply funny with a biting edge that I simply found irresistible. Not only does this keep the film from becoming too depressing but it often adds another layer of depth to the characters. Because all of this dialogue comes out of the characters it only helps to make them feel more real and therefore makes the drama feel more real. As well as this witty dialogue we get to hear the poems that the people represented in this film wrote. These poems are incredibly beautiful and moving. These poems are often accompanied onscreen by montages of what the characters are talking about, giving a greater cinematic feel to a film that could have easily felt too talky. 

Overall this is simply a masterpiece of a movie.