Mr Turner, 2.11.14



Timothy Spall's Turner at the Royal Academy

Motley hasn’t always been Mike Leigh’s greatest fan, but “Mr Turner”, his biopic of England’s greatest artist, is nothing short of a masterpiece, a strong contender for film-of-the-year. 

Leigh (71) focused on Turner’s last years before his death at 76 in 1851, a time before the railways when the quickest way from London to Margate was by sea-steamer.  Seldom have I seen a historical period brought so convincingly to life:  you could almost smell the horse-shit in the streets.



Father & Son (Paul Jesson & Timothy Spall)

Leigh’s Turner (played with gusto by Timothy Spall), the original ‘grumpy old man’, is a bluff self-made rough diamond of few words but many growls, who lives in bachelor-bliss with his beloved ‘Dada’ (Paul Jesson) and their faithful housemaid Dorothy (Hannah Danby) in a suitably filthy town-house.  He’s sired two children, for whom he takes no responsibility, and their shrewish mother comes round occasionally to berate him.  His life consists of jockeying for position with fellow hacks at the Royal Academy, buttering up aristocratic patrons, and purposeful striding into the hills to scout for new subjects to paint. 

Curmudgeons never smile:  Spall's Turner

The misused servant, her face ever more crustular as the years pass, provides an outlet for short passionless couplings until, on one of his many pseudonymous scouting expeditions, Turner meets Margate landlady Mrs Booth (the twinkly-eyed Marion Bailey).  Her ex-naval husband (Karl Johnson), tormented by his own experiences as a slaver, conveniently goes the way of all flesh, leaving Turner free to woo her, with unapologetic directness.  The faithful servant meanwhile, whose love for him is never voiced, is abandoned to an ever-dustier townhouse. 

Light relief came from two memorable cameos.  “Was ist das?” whispers the young Queen Victoria in horror to Prince Albert at Turner’s proto-impressionist daubings at the Academy.  Meanwhile Joshua McGuire’s Ruskin, a Harold Acton-style aesthete avant la lettre, pontificated on art in his stately home with magnificent vacuity (in a role interpreted by some as Leigh’s revenge on critics in general). 

This appropriately visual film, rather like Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’, conjured up a world of intense physicality, whether in the mounds of freshly ground powdered paint, the cat mess on the painter’s overcoat or the sea-swell on Turner’s bewhiskered face as he was lashed to a mast to experience the full force of a marine storm for himself.  Early Victorian England was depicted as wholly lacking in sentimentality, a place of male inarticulacy and female victimhood, where you either sank or swam. 

When Turner’s end came, ship-wrecked red-faced on Mrs Booth’s bed like the hulk of a sea-lion, we heard Spall grunt his famous last words “The sun is a God!” before the camera cut away to the two women in his life, one smiling, the other disconsolate.  Truly all human life was there.
 


Marion Bailey's Mrs Booth shares a lighter moment
with Timothy Spall's Turner

No such levity for Hannah Danby's misused servant