Artist biopics often entail a kind of contradiction. On the one hand, they study a historical individual, subject to the exigencies of the body and the contingencies of circumstance, while, on the other, they examine the subject’s art, which, qua art, must be understood in relation to an imaginative, and not strictly material, universe. By collapsing these distinct domains of inquiry, artist biopics often commit what literary criticism calls the fallacy of “biographical criticism,” two perfectly fine words that fail to be of much use as soon as they’re put together.
Terence Davies’ concerns itself with this fallacy. In recounting the life story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famed soldier-poets of WWI—whose wartime biography was previously chronicled in Pat Barker’s 1991 novel and its 1997 film adaptation—it views the artist’s
