Fierce, grumpy, and unfailingly devoted to his craft, the genius that resided in J.M.W. Turner seems to have left little room for much else. In front of his easel, he was an inimitable painter of extraordinary seascapes. In front of other people, he was brutish and cold. As beautiful as so many of his paintings are, it was a dominating, hard-hearted, and selfish person that created them. There seems to have been little in between his extremes of genius and callousness.
That, at any rate, is how he comes across in Mr. Turner, a biopic of the famed British painter of the first half of the 19th century. Directed by Mike Leigh and staring Timothy Spall, it’s a film that seems to want to present Turner as a reasonably complicated man — a being whose inner-life had a more nuanced terrain than his flat and brutish personality might lead one to suspect. But it seems unlikely many viewers will come away from the two-and-a-half-hour movie drawing that conclusion. Indeed, there’s little that we come to experience of Turner that we don’t witness in the first ten minutes of the film.
Spall, however, puts on a stellar performance — as does the rest of the cast — which alleviates the somewhat one-note vibe of the movie. As cold a figure as Turner is, Spall’s portrayal of the grumbling, grunting, experimental painter is fun to watch. That is, when he isn’t groping his longtime housekeeper and using her as a sexual object. (Other slightly less heinous acts of Turner’s include scarcely acknowledging the existence of his two daughters, whom he had with a woman named Sarah Danby.)
One might wonder early on in the movie, “What’s with this guy?” It seems like an entirely sensical question to ask, but unfortunately it’s one that viewers have little shot at answering by the end of the film — other than to say of Turner that he had some pretty awful moral failings. The film’s sole focus on the last twenty five years of Turner’s life is part of the problem. While it makes perfect sense not to tackle the entirety of his life, we are left with no context or knowledge of Turner’s youth — or, for that matter, even his middle-aged years. Was he always the serious, stern, and hard-hearted person that we see him as?
A few scenes of dialogue between Turner and his father (to whom he was exceptionally close), vaguely inform us of some events of the past, such as both his and his father’s bitter relationship with Turner’s mother. But that’s about it. For a movie which, presumably, wants us to become invested in the emotional life of the artist — not just his art — that makes little sense. Any narrative device that could have divulged at least a few things about his formative years would have been exceedingly welcome.
Where the film is quite strong, however, is showing the methods and milieu which made up Turner’s life and work habits. A frequent traveler and a prolific sketcher, the opening scene of the film shows Turner standing amidst blue skies on a gorgeous afternoon, sketchbook in hand, doing what he loved most: capturing nature. (Dick Pope’s cinematography is absolutely gorgeous.)
More than anything, we see Turner in his home studio and at the Royal Academy. A member of the prestigious institution for decades, Turner was well-respected, sometimes envied, and occasionally a showman. He’s only real weakness was his less-than-captivating lectures — but hey, even the best can’t have it all.
These scenes inside the Academy (minus his lackluster lecture), in which a confident and jovial Turner stamps around the grounds and repartees with some of his fellow painters, are some of the best in the film. In part, that’s because these are the few times where he seems somewhat relatable as a human being. Likewise, it’s in these moments where a slightly different side of the artist comes through. Painting was everything to Turner, so it’s not surprising that, insofar as he socialized, bantered, and presented a slightly softer side of himself, it was in this environment.
Biopics about artists aren’t easy to make pop. Surprisingly, given Turner’s rather dull personality and the uneventful narrative, Mr. Turner generally manages to be so. It’s lively and entertaining, and the film’s beautiful photography is practically a reason itself to sit down and watch.
As for viewers’ perceptions of Turner, they’ll of course vary. For me, Turner comes across not as a man of interesting contradictions or containing multiple layers. He comes across, rather, as one-dimensional, selfish, brutal, and an almost pathetic kind of figure whose emotional capacity was incredibly limited. Whether Turner was or wasn’t that way, I don’t know. But that’s the overwhelming impression the film gives of one of Britain’s greatest and most influential painters.
Spectatio 