"Mr. Turner" (2014), directed by Mike Leigh, is an unconventional biopic of one of Britain's finest landscape artists in the Victorian era. Its exceptional on two counts, structurally, when compared to Hollywood biographies, Leigh (who also wrote the film) doesn't endeavour to fit Turner's life into a neat three acts, instead, he assembles a morass, a mosaic, of scenes, chronicling the final quarter century of his life. It returns to some characters and not to others, allowing viewers to forge their own understanding of Turner. This leads us to the second unusual aspect of the film: Turner is not a likable character. Leigh has made no attempt to soften his lead character, from forsaking his illegitimate children to helping having his mother committed to a mental institution, mistreating those around him. Yet this is the film's strongest trait, Timothy Spall entirely lost in his character, revelling in a performance dominated by a series of richly toned grunts and groans. We're forced to reconcile the self-centred and insensitive man on screen with the extraordinary art he creates.
The greatness of Leigh's approach is that he refuses to the separate the two: Turner's genius as a painter is rooted in his own intense self-interest. In one of the film's best sequences, he astonishes his contemporaries by impulsively painting a red buoy onto a seascape of his at the Royal Academy; yet this masterstroke is motivated by his egoistical rivalry with Constable (James Fleet), his enmity fuelling his art.
The acting is strong throughout and Spall deservedly won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his work here. Leigh's direction is incredibly nuanced and his script has an ear for the verbose, ornate language of the 19th century. Only his caricature of John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) as a buffoon who misses the point of Turner's art seems like a misstep. The cinematography by Dick Pope though, cannot be criticised: the whole film is shot and lit so as to appear in the same style as Turner's painting and this results in a cascade of incredible moments (particularly the appearance of the Fighting Temeraire battleship, which inspires Turner to create one of his masterpieces).
This is a long film and it's verisimilitude is unimpeachable. If it's ever impossible to truly like the man then it's a tribute to Leigh and Spall's success that at the end of the film, as he lies on his deathbed, for the audience to feel something towards this endlessly contradictory, frustrating, exasperating, brilliant artist.
The greatness of Leigh's approach is that he refuses to the separate the two: Turner's genius as a painter is rooted in his own intense self-interest. In one of the film's best sequences, he astonishes his contemporaries by impulsively painting a red buoy onto a seascape of his at the Royal Academy; yet this masterstroke is motivated by his egoistical rivalry with Constable (James Fleet), his enmity fuelling his art.
The acting is strong throughout and Spall deservedly won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his work here. Leigh's direction is incredibly nuanced and his script has an ear for the verbose, ornate language of the 19th century. Only his caricature of John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) as a buffoon who misses the point of Turner's art seems like a misstep. The cinematography by Dick Pope though, cannot be criticised: the whole film is shot and lit so as to appear in the same style as Turner's painting and this results in a cascade of incredible moments (particularly the appearance of the Fighting Temeraire battleship, which inspires Turner to create one of his masterpieces).
This is a long film and it's verisimilitude is unimpeachable. If it's ever impossible to truly like the man then it's a tribute to Leigh and Spall's success that at the end of the film, as he lies on his deathbed, for the audience to feel something towards this endlessly contradictory, frustrating, exasperating, brilliant artist.