Rated: R
Starring: Timothy Spall
Directed by Mike Leigh
In the opening sceneof Mr. Turner, director Mike Leighrecreates the sort of image associated with the film’s namesake, a somberwindmill overspread with a symphony of light. J.M.W. Turner cared less for themill than the light, for the colors painted by the sun across the clouds andsky, and the way still waters in the windmill’s foreground caught the sun’sreflection. Turner took a gradual turn on the road to modernism; hisfascination with the play of light foreshadowed Impressionism; his delight inspray and splatter was Action Painting a century before Jackson Pollock.Cinematic recreations of Turner’s style recur through Leigh’s film, but asportrayed by Timothy Spall, this painter of beauty was not beautiful to behold.
In an unforgettableperformance, Spall’s Turner is a troll of a man, trudging purposefully with adeep scowl set into his jowly face. He came up from lower-middle-class Londonand speaks in a gruff, near Cockney accent many Americans will strain tofollow. Phlegmy and guttural, he suffers no fools but encounters them regularlyand dismisses them with derisive harrumphs and grunts. And yet he is anarticulate monster, citing Greek mythology in fully formed sentences.
Mr. Turner is a full immersion in the artist’s world, a time and placeof candlelight and teeming streets with few conveniences save the servant womanwith whom he occasionally has fast bursts of sex. At two and a half hours, thefilm moves with measured steps from the acclaim of Turner’s middle careerthrough the controversy of his later work and the physical ravages at the endof his life. He’s a likable character in his blunt irascibility, but holds backa sympathetic reserve of sadness. When a woman seated at a drawing room pianoplays a Purcell song of lost love, Turner joins in, singing the lyric in a deepgrowly voice worthy of Tom Waits. He is moved by a sense of loss.
Leigh was wise in nottrying to explain too much or psychoanalyze his subject. Other than his father,who lives with him and mixes his paints, Turner rejected his family—includinghis daughter and her child—as impertinent intrusions on his privacy and work.And yet, after hiring a prostitute in order to sketch her half in the nude, hecries uncontrollably when she tells him her age. An undramatic turning pointoccurs during a conversation with a retired captain from the slave trade. Therueful old man speaks of “such terrible sufferings I did see,” and took upreligion when he returned to land. Turner considers the revelation of horrorand responds with his most powerful painting, an uncanny oil on canvas, The Slave Ship (1840), where moral chaosis indistinguishable from the blinding storm of a hurricane.
Mr. Turner will be a delight for anyone interested in art history,especially its 19th-century British branch. Famous walk-on characters includelandscape painter John Constable, who eyes Turner warily, and critic JohnRuskin, depicted as being terribly pleased with himself. It’s just as well thatLeigh preserves the mystery surrounding Turner’s late period. The grumpyartist’s unprecedented use of paint draws a royal snub and the mockery of themusic hall in Leigh’s film but Turner presses on, slipping from the bonds of replicatingsun-dappled scenes toward embracing the sublime, the ineffable and thehorrible.
