Turner

Immediately I noticed this film advertised as being directed by Mike Leigh, I checked the cast list of "Mr Turner" (Mr T) and noticed some familiar names he cast from the 1999 film "Topsy Turvey" (TT) - a biopic about Gilbert & Sullivan and specifically about how "The Mikado" was created by the famous lyricist and composer.So in "Mr Turner" we had Timothy Spall in the title role while in TT he played Richard Temple.The physical makeup appearance of Dorothy Atkinson as Hannah Danby was very different after 15 years having played Jessie Bond in TT.Martin Savage who played George Grossmith in TT played Benjamin Robert Haydon in Mr T.Finally Lesley Manville - Lucy Gilbert in TT surprisingly played a scientist Mary Somerville in Mr T.This appears to be a coterie of some of Mike Leigh's favourite actors.Other directors like Mel Brooks similarly cast favourite actors in their films.

I learnt that Timothy Spall took two years in developing his characterisation of Joseph Mallord William Turner and that a real artist was engaged in giving him lessons in Turner's art technique.Being an amateur artist myself I would have liked to see more shots of him painting though rather than grunting.There is always a dichotomy between the arts when a biopic is produced in how much screen time you give to the central character's discipline and how much to acting out their life.In this case the producer has to cater for cinema goers who do not know about Turner and his art.Other Victorian notables who appeared in "Mr Turner" were Queen Victoria & Prince Albert, The art critic John Ruskin & John Constable (James Fleet).I also noticed a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti who often used Elizabeth Siddall as his model, since the pre-Raphaelite movement was beginning towards the end of Turner's life.References to Railways, The Great Exhibition of 1851 added a topical scientific & dramatic flavour.Most of Turner's most popular paintings were on display, most notably "The Fighting Temeraire", "Steam Fire & Air" and "Slave Ship Throwing Slaves (in a storm into the waves)".

I attended with my wife in one of the first viewings of "Mr Turner" when it went on general release on 1/11/14.I enjoyed TT a little more since this film of Mike Leigh had the additional joy of hearing G&S and I therefore gave Mr T 7/10 and TT 8/10.

Mike Leigh's "Mr Turner", a 2 1/2 hour movie had me so fascinated that it flew by. As an enraptured audience member I felt like a fly on the wall to witness Mr. Turner's life and creations of art that were depicted with such extraordinary realism. I felt on a gut level how this man's wonderful art was inspired by his feelings and the world surrounding him. There were so many wonderfully chosen moments and the scenery was so detailed and - thank God- lacking any Hollywood glamour. The characters were extremely well researched and portrayed to such a degree that I had the feeling I got to live in 1850's England for the 2 1/2 hours. There was not one moment of "acting' in this movie. How refreshing and inspiring! Timothy Spall's portrayal of Mr Turner was amazing in its detail - He inhabited the role 100 %. He embodied the painter to the last brush stroke. Equally wonderful were the women and everybody else in this brilliantly crafted movie. I shall see it again in case I have missed any detail.

I hated it... I sighed and tutted and moved around in my seat... and then about a third of the way through it won me over. In that respect (and in many others respect) it's actually a lot like a Turner.

The initial scenes of the movie, which are very irritating to sit through, set the rest up well, lots of loud stomping on wooden floorboards, dry interiors in Turneresque palettes Timothy Spall making more grunting noises than any actor should be able to and still be taken seriously... stomp stomp stomp bang bang bang, hoarse shouting instead of dialogue, character introductions so perfunctory and stark they're almost parodic of the cinematic vernacular. The movie just screams with the kind of self-absorbed worthiness and obsession with human frailty that gives 'art films' a bad name... The wife shows up and harangues Turner at a volume that would transcend satire... there's an extended sequence during which a contemporaneous artist's career is commented on, vociferously and cruelly, by a group of critics/artists/patrons as he stomps off over the fields, this scene plays nothing like a conversation, but rather as if the script writer had typed out a series of quotes from a biography...Turner molests his housekeeper in the gruntiest, unsexiest way possible but it's SO clumsy and awkward the scene burns itself out and it just looks totally lifeless...actors expending effort poorly...

But the movie carries on like this with such gusto and wholeheartedness that it eventually became quite difficult (for me, at any rate) to remain cynical and detached. I did find myself immersed in the life of the man.

Timothy Spall's performance is completely over the top, and actually rather unpleasant to experience. Grunt, bash, bang, smash, grunt, growl, stomp, bash, grunt... it's almost a cartoon. You certainly can't come away from this movie liking the man you've just watched. He's an extremely annoying man. But as the movie progresses new flavours enter the character and it becomes clear that this movie isn't really a story at all, it really is primarily a portrait (rather as Turner's landscapes often seem more like portraits... so moody and full of consequence and meaning). Should I be disappointed at that? Perhaps I should, but I wasn't. Judging the movie on how it achieves it's intentions I should probably give it a 10... (Only I think it went on too long).

The scene that made me realise that the film-maker was fully aware of how I felt about this man I was watching came near the end when Turner's popularity is waning and he attends the Academy exhibition to be confronted with the Pre-Raphaelites. He starts sniggering. Nowhere in the movie is any attempt to explain his art or his theory of his art or the theory of any of the art contemporaneous with his and yet the scene makes perfect sense.

Very nicely done.

It is like his art. I don't like Turner, but I can't really *dismiss* Turner as I might someone more widely "respected" like Mondrian or Lichtenstien... or...(eyeroll)...Rothko.

There's a scene with an elephant. Mike Leigh spends some time on getting this scene right. I think it might mean something... Such a long time it's been since a movie made me actually *ponder* on whether or not I liked it... That's got to be worth something.

Mike Leigh is perhaps best-known for his serio-comic social-realist dramas about contemporary British life, films like "Abigail's Party" and "Life Is Sweet", but he also seems to be developing a sideline in biographies of nineteenth-century cultural figures. First there was "Topsy-Turvy" about Gilbert and Sullivan, and now we have "Mr. Turner" about the life and career of the artist J. M. W. Turner. Or rather about the latter part of his life and career; when we first meet him he is already middle-aged.

Leigh has described Turner as "a great artist: a radical, revolutionary painter," and this is undoubtedly true; Turner's work, especially his later work, seems to prefigure Impressionism, perhaps at times even abstract Modernism. We must not, however, allow our appreciation of the progressive side of Turner's work to degenerate into that lazy cliché about the great artist starving in a garret, scorned or neglected by his contemporaries but later discovered by a grateful posterity. (Very few great artists, except perhaps Van Gogh, have ever conformed to this stereotype). He was greatly admired by his contemporaries, was praised in the highest terms by many critics, especially Ruskin, became a full Royal Academician while still in his twenties, never lacked for patrons and died a wealthy man. By contrast his great contemporary and rival, John Constable, whose art seems much less radical to our eyes, had a much harder struggle to establish himself.

Leigh's purpose in making the film was to "examine the tension between this very mortal, flawed individual, and the epic work, the spiritual way he had of distilling the world." This tension is something very obvious in the film. Turner, especially in later life, was noted for his eccentricity. Unlike many working-class Georgians and Victorians who rose in the world, he never attempted to hide his humble origins. He was untidy, had no social graces and could be rude and tactless. He never married but had a number of mistresses. He was estranged from the first of these, Sarah Danby, and refused to acknowledge his two illegitimate daughters by her. (Sarah appears in the film as do two other mistresses, Hannah Danby Sarah's niece and Turner's housekeeper and Sophia Booth, a seaside landlady).

And yet this uncouth, boorish-seeming man was an artist not only of genius but also of a deep spirituality. His obsession with accurately recording light and atmospheric conditions- he once had himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he could paint a snowstorm- was born not only of a concern with fidelity to nature but also of a belief that light was a visible manifestation of the Divine. (His last words are said to have been "The sun is God").

How, then, could any actor hope to play so contradictory an individual? The answer to this question comes from Timothy Spall, one of Leigh's favourite actors. Spall is someone I have normally thought of as a "character actor", but here he gets the chance to prove himself as a leading man and makes the most of it. His Turner is a grumpy old man, and in his dealings with women something of a dirty old man as well, forever grunting and spitting and forever speaking in a sort of Cockney whine, and yet we are never allowed to forget that underneath his unpromising exterior he is a sublime artist. This is probably the finest performance I have seen Spall give; it won him "Best Actor" at the Cannes Film Festival and I hope that the Academy will bear him in mind when it comes to next year's Oscars. There is insufficient space to single out all the deserving supporting performances, although I should mention Martin Savage as Turner's friend and fellow-painter Benjamin Haydon, forever trying to borrow money off him, Paul Jesson as Turner's father, to whom he was very close, and Joshua McGuire in a comic turn as an effeminate, lisping Ruskin, very different to the way Greg Wise portrayed him in the recent "Effie Gray".

The other outstanding feature of the film is its visual beauty. Leigh and his cinematographer Dick Pope were clearly aiming to make it one of those films where every shot looks like a painting in its own right, and certainly succeed in this ambition. Some cinematic biographies of great artists, such as "Girl with a Pearl Earring" about Vermeer, do succeed in capturing the distinctive "look" of their subject, but I think that Leigh and Pope were not actually aiming to make every shot look like a Turner; their palette of colours, for example, is rather too muted for that. Possibly they felt that the peculiar luminosity of Turner's work would be too difficult to reproduce on film. There are, however, some memorable shots, such as the opening scene by the river in Holland, complete with windmill, and the one where Turner watches "the fighting Temeraire" being towed up the Thames, thereby getting the inspiration for one of his best-known works.

I am not sure if "Mr Turner" quite justifies the label "masterpiece" which some have tried to pin on it; it can at times be too slow-moving for that. Spall's wonderful acting, however, and Pope's striking cinematography make it a film that stands out from the crowd. 8/10

Although previous movies about artists haven't set the bar very high, 'Mr Turner' is one of the most authentic films about an individual following this occupation. Director Mike Leigh makes no attempt to string together a conventional biography of Britain's greatest landscape painter - his fragmented account simply observes a variety of the artist's interactions with his beloved father, wealthy patrons, colleagues, critics and mistresses during his later years.

JMW Turner was born and raised the son of a London barber, and although he became the house-guest of aristocrats, he never adopted the persona of a cosmopolitan sophisticate. The film follows his restless workaholic progress from studio to exhibition opening, from brothel to stately home, and on to rented rooms in cheap lodging houses bordering the subject matter which he loved to paint. The painter's early work was relatively conventional as he mimicked the styles of some illustrious predecessors. During the latter part of his life - financially secure and with his reputation established - he embarked on a series of ambitious paintings which anticipated the styles of artists who arrived on the scene several decades afterward. Turner's coarse manners and social awkwardness were infamous, but they are probably exaggerated for dramatic effect in this portrayal. However that's a minor gripe - at the center of the film is Timothy Spall's fine portrayal of an eccentric virtuoso going about the business of being an artist.