for unicorns at the bottom of
his garden.
Peace of mind and
contentment are precisely
what eluded Sassoon, a
closeted gay man, for most
of his life, while the search
for what he had lost would
be his defining achievement
as a poet. That makes Davies’s
film a rare biopic that has
as its themes not
breakthrough and acclaim,
but anguish, loneliness and
disappointment. Only a biopic
of Philip Larkin could match it
for glums.
Sassoon’s closest pass at
contentment comes in the
form of the young poet
Wilfred Owen (Matthew
Tennyson), whom he meets
and mentors while at
Craiglockhart, but who dies
shortly after returning to the
front. Once the war is over,
Sassoon is drawn into a toxic
embrace with the Bright
Young Things of 1920s London
— Stephen Tennant (Calam
Lynch) and the “amusing but
unpleasant” Ivor Novello
( Jeremy Irvine) — before
retreating into “the shadow
life” and a passionless
heterosexual marriage with
Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips).
“You must redeem my life for
me,” he tells her, like a man
waving from a sinking ship.
I don’t think I’m offering
any spoilers when I say that
nobody redeems him. Acclaim
does not come except
posthumously. He ends up
being played in embittered
old age by Peter Capaldi,
which is a bit like hearing that
your commemorative statue
is to be made by Alberto
Giacometti. Don’t over-buy on
bunting. Sassoon is almost the
opposite of the way we like
our literary geniuses on
screen. “I am unable to take
risks,” he tells Dr Rivers and,
in many ways, Davies has
honoured his spirit to make a
film that is as anguished and
cagey as the man himself,
with lots of stylised tableaux,
grainy black-and-white
archival footage and a script
that captures the brittle,
black wit of a man whistling
in the dark.
Only finally, at the end, do
we get anything resembling
a release as Sassoon recites
Owen’s poem Disabled over
a Ralph Vaughan Williams
symphony. If a single close-up
can alter the trajectory and
emotional tenor of an entire
movie, Lowden’s does it. cHow many thrillers or horror
movies have you seen — from
Strangers on a Train to Friday
the 13th — begin to fall apart
on contact with the question
“Why don’t they just call the
police?”. If people stopped
freelancing their own criminal
cases, half of the movies in
existence would disappear. It
turns out that the answer to
this conundrum was staring
screenwriters in the face all
the time. Just add the factor of
race. Mix, stir and voilà. The
trap is sprung.
In Carey Williams’s
Emergency, two black
students at an upmarket
American university have an
epic night of partying planned
for three weeks shy of their
graduation. Kunle (Donald
Elise Watkins), is a straight-A
student in button-down shirts.
He’s “basically white on the
inside”, according to his
friend Sean (RJ Cyler), a
streetwise party boy who has
the whole night planned out
like a board game: seven frat
bashes in quick succession
with brief pit stops for weed.
Briefly debating whether to
bring along their room-mate,
a spacy Latino named Carlos
(Sebastian Chacon), who
seems more intent on his
video games, they discover a
spanner in the works: a white
girl passed out on their living
room floor. They check for a
pulse. She briefly revives to
throw up, then slips back into
unconsciousness. What
should they do? Call the cops?
Dump her somewhere else?
What if she dies? Or should
they take her to hospital
themselves?
Expanding on an 11-minute
short that won an award
at Sundance in 2018,
Williams and the
screenwriter KD
Dávila have made
one of those
comedies, like After
Hours or Superbad,
about an epic night of
working on a dissertation
about bacteria specimens who
so far has had no reason to
distrust white authority.
“You’re gonna have your own
Wikipedia page, you nerd,”
says Sean, who knows better
than any what happens if they
call the cops. Their panicked
debates over what to do with
the girl are the stuff of bro
comedy, but also bristle with
real-world implications, and
the realities of race in
America, without growing
starchy with “message”.
There’s no need. That reality
is right there on the screen,
staring us all in the face.
A sadness as strong as
incense all but overpowers
Terence Davies’s elegant,
emotionally clenched
Benediction. You could say
all the same things about its
subject, Siegfried Sassoon, the
First World War hero who
won the Military Cross, but
fiercely opposed the war,
writing poetry about the hell
of the trenches that still
shocks us. “In the face of such
slaughter, one cannot simply
‘order’ one’s conscience,”partying that turns into a
nightmare without resorting
to farce.
These three young men
have no wise authority figures
to call on in an emergency. It’s
nape-of-the-neck funny; the
laughs come brushed with
goose bumps. After briefly
attempting to dump the girl
in front of one of the other
fraternities, they decide to
take her to hospital, using
campus backroads. Yet by this
point the girl’s sister, Maddy
(Sabrina Carpenter), has
tracked her phone, and is in
hot pursuit with her friends
Alice (Madison Thompson)
and Rafael (Diego Abraham).
The whole thing unfurls like
a bad dream. You never sense
the writers at the edges of the
frame, pouring gasoline on
the problem — all they need to
do is blow the kindling
and see it ignite,
throwing each of
the boys’ characters
into vivid relief.
The son of a
family of African
immigrant doctors,
Kunle is a science nerdFILM
Party politics
Sassoon ( Jack Lowden)
declares,
only to be sent by the
under-secretary of state for
war to a psych ward at
Craiglockhart War Hospital,
where his conscientious
objection is filed away as
a nervous breakdown.
“What I feel cannot be
talked away or soothed into
silence,” he tells the therapist
Dr Rivers (Ben Daniels),
explaining that he seeks
“peace of mind, contentment,
to no longer search for what’s
lost”. He might as well wishTHE
CRITICSThree’s a crowd Sebastian
Chacon, Donald Elise Watkins
and RJ Cyler in EmergencyThey have
panicked
debates over
what to do
with the girl
A reckless student rave-up turns into a nightmare in this
twisted comedy that tackles the realities of race in America
TOM
SHONE
Emergency
Carey Williams, 15, 104min
HHHH
Benediction
Terence Davies, 12A, 137min
HHH
14 22 May 2022