Peter Capaldi's 'Benediction' To Debut In U.S. Theaters In May

The Siegfried Sassoon biopic Benediction premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival. It's the second stop on the unspoken kick-off to awards season, where major titles either launch in hopes of making a run for the Oscars or look for a buyer to head up next year's hopefuls. The film, a festival favorite when it showed, was part of the latter group and was picked up by Roadside Attractions for its North American release. Written and directed by Terence Davies (A Quiet Passion), the biopic stars Jack Lowden (War & Peace) and Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) as the war poet Sassoon in his early and later years.

Sassoon was born in 1886 in Matfield in the U.K. to upper-class parents. His father was the scion of the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, though disinherited for marrying a Catholic. (The marriage didn't last, and his father died when Siegfried was young.) Still, he was part of the group educated at Cambridge in the Edwardian years and then sent to the battlefields in the Great War as an officer. The experience radicalized him, and in 1917 he became an anti-war activist, celebrated for his poetry and writings. He also came out of the closet at a time when living openly as a gay man was not done and spent the 1920s as part of the group known as the Bright Young Things.

Eventually, Sassoon retreated into the closet and the catholic faith, marrying Hester Gatty. (Their son, George Sassoon, became a famous author and translator in his own right.) The Sassoons eventually separated during World War II, and Siegfried passed in 1967. The film spans the breadth of Sassoon's life, but not linearly, flitting back and forth from youth to old age and back again, less interested in the life story and more in the moments when Sassoon reached the period of his greatest genius.