Mr. Turner
Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere"—which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love—yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.
The film's title character is one of many such characters in "Mr. Turner." Timothy Spall plays the Cockney painter, who imbued often outwardly unremarkable panoramas with an intensely spiritual feeling that's intriguingly hard to match up with the man we see before us onscreen. Often described as the "painter of light," Turner was part of the Romantic school of painters, whose work eventually led, on visual art's slowly unfolding timeline, to the Impressionists. The film is appropriately fascinated by light and color and what it takes to create or re-create them. Turner, who's a stiff when it comes to talking about everything else in life, can go on forever about light. He listens closely when his Scottish polymath cousin Mary Somerville (Lesley Manville) schools him on the magnetic properties of violet, or when his father (Paul Jesson), who travels the world buying his son paint, warns him, "Ultramarine's going up a guinea a bladder."
That the performances are excellent will come as no surprise to Leigh fans. Spall, who's had a remarkably varied career, adds another fine portrait to his own actor's gallery with Turner, a character who's impossible to fully fathom (as if you'd want to!) and even more impossible to approve of. He can be high-handed, brusque, oblivious. But there's something immensely sad about him, and you can sense it most strongly during moments like the one pictured at the top of this page, when he's seen from a distance, from head to toe, moving through the sorts of landscapes that he himself might paint. These images, photographed by Leigh's regular cinematographer Dick Pope, express the essence of a phrase used by Manville, "the interconnectedness of all things."
A gorgeous, important film.
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