"Too often mired in petty quarrels and emotional limbos, Sassoon the poet eventually emerges as an opaque figure whose personality seems to be stunted by his wartime experience and the physical deterioration from Lowden to Capaldi, who plays an elderly Sassoon saddled with his insipid son George (Goulding), is too much to credit, Capaldi's gaunt, sourpuss persona is a bad casting decision. Lowden, though merely 3 years after Josie Rourke's MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (2018), it seems the bloom is off the rose already, is unable to ignite the screen but soldiers on with stamina, his best scenes are with a delicately wistful Geraldine James, who plays Sassoon's mother, faintly apprehensive of her son's entanglement with his "pretty boys"."
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