A slow, stately biopic about poet Siegried Sassoon and the demons that plagued him after serving in WWI.
The movie has serious Evelyn Waugh vibes, especially "Brideshead Revisited." WWI stories always fascinate me, especially when they're about how much the war screwed up the psyches of the people who were caught up in it. This film is overall satisfying, if a bit repetitive. A huge amount of time is spent on Sassoon, a more or less openly gay man, and his various love affairs, all with caricatures of flamboyant, bitchy gay men and all of them leaving you wondering what he wanted to be around them for in the first place. Seriously, were all gay men this hateful in the 1920s? But then you think about how marginalized they were, and the answer is, well, yeah, maybe they were. They had a lot to be hateful about.
The one reason to see this movie is a big one, and that's the central performance of Jack Lowden. He's magnificent in this. Easily award worthy, though a group like the Academy Awards wouldn't recognize him in a million years.
Grade: A-
