The latest work from the great British director Mike Leigh
(“Topsy-Turvy”), “Mr. Turner” focuses on the life of another masterful British
artist: early 19th century Romantic landscape painter J.M.W. Turner (Timothy
Spall). Leigh’s film runs counter to the other Great Man biopics that flooded
this year’s Oscar season by taking a warts-and-all approach, which frequently
makes the film as prickly and difficult to like as its dyspeptic protagonist.
Leigh gets a lot of mileage out of contrasting Turner’s frequently boorish,
insensitive behavior with the natural beauty of the paintings he produces, but
the outstanding performances and lush photography ensure that the underlying
unpleasantness never completely overwhelms things.
Mostly
plotless, the film follows the artist from middle age, when he was already an
established artist whose works delighted the public, to his final days.
Throughout, Turner travels around England capturing on canvas the most sublime
landscapes he encounters. The shapelessly constructed “Mr. Turner”
differentiates itself from tidier biopics like “The Imitation Game,” which feel
the need to find a direct correlation between past incidents and its subject’s
current achievements. That makes for neat thematic symmetry but has the effect
of dramatically oversimplifying a life.
Spall is a
talented, versatile performer, though he’s made a career out of playing a parade
of sniveling, odious characters. His performance stands out in his filmography
through the complexity and shading he brings to the role. Turner has a certain
piggishness to him (both in features and in personality), and he’s
spectacularly inarticulate; he grunts and snorts nearly as much as he talks, as
though he can’t be bothered to muster up the energy to speak fully formed words
to people he finds himself obligated to converse with. Spall makes the
grotesquery compelling, and he’s able to wring a wealth of meaning out of the
various tones of these guttural utterances.
Leigh makes
it plain that Turner is a man of great vision, a so-called “painter of
light,” but when dealing with other people, he’s woefully inept and
callous. He’s neglectful of his family, even as he’s doted on by his elderly
father (Paul Jesson), whom Turner employs as studio
assistant, and his somewhat simple-minded housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy
Atkinson), who carries an unrequited love for him despite his predilection
toward taking sexual advantage of her. He’s scolded by his ex-lover, Sarah
Danby (Ruth Sheen), when she stops by, and never publicly acknowledges the two
daughters the couple share.
Seemingly detesting both high-minded
intellectuals and low-class philistines in equal measure, Turner makes his
all-encompassing disdain evident in scenes in which he’s dismissive even of the
fawning critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire). Consistently, his behavior hints
as to why people don’t often appear much in Turner’s works. He seems fully
engaged only during a brief visit from Scottish polymath Mary Somerville
(Lesley Manville), who arrives at his home to offer a demonstration of the
magnetic properties of violet. Turner himself feels he’s a “gargoyle,” though
he softens slightly as he pursues a romance with the good-natured Mrs. Booth (a
delightful Marion Bailey), who rents him a room during his visits to the
seaside town of Margate. Their relationship brings out a sensitivity in him
that we don’t witness in any other aspect of his life.
“Mr. Turner”
is filled with golden-hued, painterly compositions from cinematographer Dick
Pope, whose Oscar-nominated work utilizes light and shadow to bring life to the
lushly photographed landscapes, often making it hard to tell if you’re looking
at one of Turner’s paintings of “boats in the fiery firmament,” or the real
thing.
Depicting
the painter’s late-career shift away from Romanticism and toward woozy
Impressionism, the film implies that the switch was Turner’s nonconformist
response to finding his place in a changing world, as the introduction of the
daguerreotype increased the artistic value of photorealism. Nevertheless,
Turner still demonstrates a consideration for his legacy, as in a fascinating
scene in which he’s offered (and refuses) an obscene amount of money for the
purchase of his life’s work, instead wishing his works to remain accessible to
anyone who wishes to view them. Cumulatively, these disconnected scenes meld
together to form a complicated portrait of the man within whom the grotesque
coexisted and blended together with the magnificent, creating a portrait as
impressionistic as one of its subject’s celebrated seascapes.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2015.
