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

Pride, 23.9.14

George Mackay's Bromley discovers his inner activist

A bevy of luvvies (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, Paddy Considine) starred in this warm crowd-pleaser about a small group of gay activists who fund-raised for the miners during the 1984/5 strike, despite themselves being under attack from homophobes, viruses and the tabloids. 

Heavily-inspired by “Made in Dagenham”, an earlier Brit-flick about marginalised people coming of age during a strike, Matthew Warchus’s feel-good ensemble flick transmuted challenging story-lines into something more uplifting, while occasionally teetering on the verge of corniness.  Much of the story-line was apparently based on fact:  a South Wales colliery band did indeed repay the gay activists' support by leading the 1985 London “Pride” march and NUM block-votes subsequently helped shift Labour party policy on the age of consent. 

Imelda Staunton hits the dance-floor at the Miners' Welfare Club

In the tradition of miners' strike films ("Billy Elliott", "The Full Monty"), Stephen Beresford's script focused squarely on the links between the personal and the political.  Framed as a coming-out tale for 20yo “Bromley” (a gawky catering student well under-played by George Mackay), the film was saturated in Eighties cultural signifiers (à la “Peter’s Friends”, “Starter for Ten”) and looked back nostalgically to the days when playing Bronski Beat, Frankie and Billy Bragg was the standard form of protest. 

A morality tale about the personal confidence to be gained from standing up and reaching across social borders, the film had fun with the classic British trope of introducing urbanites to a traditional provincial setting (cf “Withnail and I”).  Most of the best lines went to the miners' wives, very much the glue holding the pit-village together.  A bulked-up Staunton rather stole the show as a redoubtable Welsh battle-axe you probably wouldn't want to bump into on an unlit street at night. 
 

"LGSM:  Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners"

Ben Schnetzer was the quiffed and gobby activist who led a motley band of naifs to raise funds for a Welsh pit village 'so small there were no vowels in its name' (his character apparently based on real-life activist Mark Watson, who fell victim to AIDS only two years after the strike).  Dominic West had fun playing against standard macho type as a flamboyant Seventies ‘dancing queen’, while Andrew Scott ("Sherlock's" Moriarty) had to be more buttoned-up as West's gay-bashed Welsh lover.  The film played amusingly too with the uneasy gay/lesbian dialectic. 

For those of us who remember these events first-hand, it was striking what a different world 1984 was compared to today, similarly oppressive governments aside.  Motley found himself far more drawn to it as a wised-up forty-something than he probably would have done as a shy provincial teenager at the time.  Better late than never!