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    Mike Leigh: MR. TURNER (2014)

    MIKE LEIGH: MR. TURNER (2014) ]


    Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner

    Leigh's beautiful non-biopic J.M.W. Turner biopic skirts convention so closely viewers may miss it

    In his Topsy Turvy-like movie about the great English working-class-origins landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Mike Leigh flirts dangerously closely with conventions and emerges with a sense of originality so subtle it's not certain audiences will get what he's doing. What could be cornier than a picture about a landscape painter that's full of mimicry of his classic uses of sunlight and haze? With the help of cinematographer Dick Pope, this is just what Mr. Turner does, yet it's repeatedly breathtaking. The "Fighting Temeraire," the boat on the way to demolition in the celebrated painting, is added in by CGI; but the water and the light were captured by Pope. Nothing could capture the magic of the painting in the National Gallery (no reproduction can) but with his color widescreen images Pope delivers beauty on top of beauty without seeming heavy-handed or conventional.

    What would be more obvious than a sky above-mud below portrait of an artistic genius who produces gorgeous and etherial images yet is a crude, inarticulate boor? Mr. Turner delivers that kind of obvious contrast too. Yet thanks to the subtle, meandering specificity of Leigh's action (influenced no doubt by his working methods of a long period of improvisational character development rehearsing leading up to the shoot), and due also to Timouthy Spall's complexly enigmatic character portrayal, a mass of downward looks and a symphony of communicative grunts, this standard contrast comes to seem both inevitable and unique.

    J.M.W. Turner, as seen here with his father, his ex-mistress, his housekeeper-cum-lover of convenience and his naive Margate final mistress Mrs. Booth (Marion Bailey), is a classic obsessive type, whose fascination with color and light and originality in manner and media of painting (later mocked by his enemies in a music hall skit), is depicted not by any declarations or debates, but through moments of action. (Spall has explained that he spent several years learning how to paint before the making of the film.) Turner is hardly a high liver. We barely even see him eat (there's a bit of crude sex with the housekeeper, and initiation of relations indicated with Mrs. Booth). But we see pigments ordered and his father mixing them. We see canvases set up. We see morning and evening light contemplated. We see Turner rushing from one place to another. He does not acknowledge having any children (he had several by the earlier mistress, played by Ruth Sheen); he has no use at all for the ex-mistress. He is abrupt with the housekeeper. He seems hard on his father, though they are like brothers, and kiss on both cheeks when they meet.

    In everything Turner is a man illustrating the first and sacrosanct rule of an artist: "The important thing is to be doing the work." It's all that matters. All else is secondary. This may go against the bourgeois artist pattern of those, like Magritte, who go off to their studio every morning as to a desk job, and come home punctually at night. But how many serious artists are like that? Ultimately Turner's obsessiveness in Leigh's film isn't a romantic cliché, but more a no-nonsense representation of artistic practice of all artists whose genius and commitment make their work great and their private lives a bit of a shambles.

    The other element of course is the setting and the period feel, which also risk seeming merely conventional. These Leigh has said are as thorough and authentic as they could make them, however inadequate that may turn out to be. We begin with a standard costume-drama street scene, with a horse-drawn carriagte tooling along an elaborate period-authentic street. And this is where Mr. Turner runs the greatest risks -- because the film may seem to look very much like a Masterpiece Theater TV drama, and the 2 1/2 hour run-time may make you think it ought to be a mini-series. Look more closely, though. Because Mike Leigh films, even the most Masterpiece Theater-ish, are essentially maverick, sui generis works, playing their Englishness for all they've got, using typically excellent English actors, but going their own way.

    It's been said that some of the most memorable moments of Mr. Turner are those of the artist with other artists, notably the "problematic" loser of an biblical painter Hayden (Martin Savage) , and the whole row of other painters at the Royal Academy (a magnificently realized setting). This is not so certain. Turner's run-ins with the annoying and pathetic Hayden are examples of Leigh's liking for colorful and funny bits. They also show Turner not suffering fools gladly. As for the Royal Academy encounters with other artists, well-staged though these are visually, they feel perfunctory, a costumed reading-off of an indexed list of names. They show how the outer edges of Leigh's films at times can seem unnecessary. Like so many 2 1/2 hour films, even this one could have lost 15 or 20 minutes without pain and with more focus. But Leigh treasures his sense of naturalism and his sense of milieu, and these are superbly rich, not only in human detail but in historical atmosphere.

    Would one have liked to cut out the highly satirical representation of a young, spoiled, lisping, slightly nelly John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire), the budding critic who champions Turner's proto-impressionist, increasingly abstract work at a time when the pre-Raphaelites are gaining center stage? No, that's another one of Leigh's funny bits, and another sign of Turner's total independence and focus. He doesn't promote himself. He hides his identity (at first with Mrs. Booth). And he does not care if he is being promoted. (He rebuffs Ruskin's dismissal of Claude Lorrain with a comparison so crude the young snob doesn't seem to get it.)

    Would one cut the sequence where Turner has a daguerreotype made, asking the photographer many questions and then saying, with throwaway fatalism, "Then I think I'm finished"? Of course not, because it's another poignant bit of art history. Turner isn't seeing himself out-dated, but seeing the world change. Mr. Turner is made up of this collection of segments, sacrificing strong narrative, while not avoiding biopic conventions (death scene and bequeathment declaration). This, besides the subtle skirting of conventions, is another reason why conventional audiences may not embrace this film, or if they do, will do so for the wrong reasons. But for me its magic remains in its overriding sense of a man whose life more than anything else is a passionate pursuit of shimmering luminosity.

    ....................
    DP Dick Pope at P&I Q&A..................... Mike Leigh [CK Photos]


    Mr. Turner, 149 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where Timothy Spall won the Best Actor prize. Many other international festivals, including Telluride and Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release (Sony Pictures Classics) 19 December.


    "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up" (1838)
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-29-2015 at 11:55 AM.

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