Movies about artists typically stumble toward their most basic goal: to link the paint on the canvas to the psyche of the painter. Ed Harris’s Pollock worked masterfully, as does Mr. Turner, British director Mike Leigh’s complex portrait of the esteemed English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner.
Through beautiful cinematography (reflecting the artist's attention to light), Leigh’s learned script, and Timothy Spall’s robust performance, Mr. Turner presents a lush visual biography that’s strikingly relevant considering its subject died in 1851.
Turner’s muse was the sea, either at its calmest or most agitated, and his emotions surfed those extremes as well. He was comfortable in his own skin, and simultaneously serene and giddy at an easel (there’s a bounce to his step when he’s contemplating his own work) but he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Permanently estranged from his lady friend (the acerbic Ruth Sheen, a regular member of Leigh’s acting company) and the two daughters alleged to be his own, he was ever at odds with those he considered intellectually or artistically inferior.
At the core of the film is a large multi-artist exhibition at the Royal Academy, where supporters and detractors demonstrate the adage that everyone's a critic. Turner applies a dab of red paint to a mostly white-gray seascape, shocking crowd and raising the charge that he's "ruined a masterpiece." But he was playing them; later, he wipes away half of the splotch and announces that it's a buoy.
Eventually, Turner's work falls out of favor due to dismissive assessments from a fickle public and a young Queen Victoria, who believe his point of view is no longer new or lively. And as railroads supplant shipping, his focus on the sea becomes too quaint to be maintained. He retires to Margate, a coastal town, and the comforts of a new widow who'd been providing him lodging there for years.
Leigh's films take shape through weeks of improvisation with his casts; by the time cameras roll, characters are organically embedded in the actors who play them. Spall won best actor prizes at Cannes and from the New York Film Critics Circle for his warts-and-all performance, which grunts, spits and spews Turner alive. By fearlessly painting a portrait of a man unconcerned with being liked, Spall finds Turner’s complexity and truth.
Mr. Turner | Dir. Mike Leigh |150 min. |Tivoli Cinemas, 4050 Pennsylvania, Kansas City, Mo., 64111, 816-383-7756
