Mr Turner
Mike Leigh (2014)
It’s remarkable, given the look of his early work, that Mike Leigh can now make a film as technically accomplished and as beautiful as Mr Turner. It’s ironic, given the kind of people and social milieu that Leigh is best known for exploring, that he’s now being overpraised for putting on the screen a life story which has cultural class (perhaps doubly ironic in the sense that it seems J M W Turner, during his actual lifetime, was no one’s idea of classy). In principle, a biopic that doesn’t keep baldly announcing when and where things are happening and relying on clumsy dialogue to explain who’s who is appealing. Mike Leigh seems to be joking about the latter convention when Turner (Timothy Spall) and John Constable (James Fleet) greet each other by name but the eschewal of obvious signposting turns Mr Turner into something of a struggle if, like me, you lack much prior knowledge of the subject and the dramatis personae. (And a long struggle – 149 minutes.) I didn’t get a clear idea of Turner’s standing within the contemporary art establishment. At a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, his offering is placed in an ante-room rather than the main gallery and there’s a suggestion that this is a snub by the Exhibition committee. Did this always happen and does it mean that Turner was never fully accepted by the Academy? Yet a later episode in the film suggests his public renown was so great that, when his reputation began to decline, it was remarked upon at various social levels. Leigh makes the point protractedly: first, Queen Victoria, with Prince Albert, inspects Turner’s latest on a gallery wall and rubbishes it. Next, two posh ladies (critics, according to the cast list on IMDB) tell the camera what they think. Finally, there’s a music hall routine satirising Turner’s work: the audience roars with laughter – to the discomfort of the artist, seated in his box in the theatre. (The music hall troupe includes Sam Kelly, an inveterate over-actor who, in this, his last screen appearance, plays at the right level.) Perhaps there was always a dichotomy between Turner’s academic and popular status but Mike Leigh doesn’t trouble to explain this.
According to Wikipedia, the film covers the last quarter-century of the artist’s life although the passage of time is suggested only by Timothy Spall’s make-up and by the changes of cat at Turner’s London home. Historical personages keep popping up briefly and watching this parade may be fun if you recognise their names. More often than not, I didn’t and felt the cast members concerned tended to play their characters as cartoons. But you can hardly blame the actors: their opportunities for making an impression are limited – if they don’t overdo things, they may not register at all (that does happen in a few cases). One or two of the cameos – such as James Fleet’s Constable and Lesley Manville’s Mary Somerville (the scientist and polymath after whom the Oxford college is named) – are intelligent and enjoyable. Leo Bill’s overplaying of the photographer J E Mayall is, unfortunately, more typical.
Some scenes work well. Leigh’s pleasantly detailed recreation of a musical entertainment in a grand house is enlivened by the singing of Alice Bailey Johnson and by James Norton’s brief but amusing appearance as a clarinettist. Turner’s visit to a brothel expresses strongly the contrast between the pretty young prostitute’s weary readiness to give her client his money’s worth (Kate O’Flynn delivers the line ‘I do extras’ with a perfect flatness) and Turner’s overriding interest in her body as something he can draw. This sequence contributes to Mike Leigh’s portrait of a man whose art comes first, before other people or pleasures or the good of one’s health, yet Mr Turner has too many scenes that seem to have been included because the writer-director liked the idea of them rather than to serve any discernible purpose in the film’s larger scheme. The lighting (by Dick Pope), production design (Suzie Davies) and costume design (Jacqueline Durran) are all very fine though I’m not sure that Mike Leigh, even now, conceives his films in much visual depth. He has a habit here of introducing a sequence within a landscape in a way that makes the landscape perfunctory. The opening sequence shows two Dutch women walking in the countryside past a windmill and the camera then reveals Turner standing nearby, sketching them. Leigh seems almost impatient with having to set the scene – he wants to get on with the business of characterising Turner. When later on, Turner climbs up a hillside followed by three horses in orderly single file you can practically hear the director calling ‘action’ and ‘cut’. I guess that, for those who know the work reasonably well, the images that Leigh and Dick Pope have created will evoke Turner paintings. That’s a far from negligible technical achievement but it doesn’t mean that Mr Turner is itself a work of art, any more than the film of Girl with a Pearl Earring, which emulated the colouring and subject matter of Vermeer. A sequence describing how ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ got its name, although its visual composition is brilliant, is a momentarily jarring reversion to conventional biopic.
Timothy Spall’s Turner is a magnificent physical characterisation, whether he’s handling the artist’s materials or just striding across a London street. Muttering and growling, Spall is completely in the character yet I can’t help feeling that the plaudits for his work here (he’s already won Best Actor prizes at Cannes and from the New York Film Critics) partly reflect overdue recognition of a long, admirable career that hasn’t previously included this kind of starring role in cinema. And, since Mike Leigh has chosen to illustrate by repetition rather than to explore Turner’s obsessive approach to his art, it’s difficult for Spall to do other than repeat too. It’s thanks only to his natural warmth, though, that Turner doesn’t become a pain. Spall is supported by a mixed bag of performances in the featured parts. Paul Jesson is likeable as William Turner, the father to whom the artist was so close: there’s only a decade in age between Jesson and Spall – the pair seem as much brothers as father and son but in fact this helps to convey their easy kinship. Martin Savage isn’t bad as the unhappy, unsuccessful painter Benjamin Haydon but, unless you know beforehand something of his biography and relationship with Turner, it’s hard to grasp why Haydon is given much more coverage than other contemporaries.
Joshua McGuire’s John Ruskin is crudely caricatural and Leigh appears to have encouraged this. When Ruskin is explaining why he thinks Claude Lorrain overrated, the words uttered amount to an intelligent argument, regardless of whether or not it’s one that Turner and the other artists present agree with; but McGuire delivers the lines in a way that can only make the speaker of them ridiculous. Leigh must also take much of the responsibility for Dorothy Atkinson’s uncertain playing of Hannah Danby, Turner’s faithful, sexually exploited housekeeper. Atkinson gives the plain, used Hannah a stagy eccentric gait from the start. Like the actors who have only one scene, she seems anxious to do-a-character immediately: Mike Leigh should have assured her there would be plenty of screen time in which to build one. Atkinson is effective when she acts naturally but too often she reacts overemphatically. As Sarah Danby (Hannah’s aunt by marriage, Turner’s first mistress and the mother of his two illegitimate daughters), Ruth Sheen speaks too deliberately in her first scene; she’s better when Sarah’s anger with Turner is mixed with upset. I don’t usually care for David Horovitch but he’s very good as Turner’s doctor, striking a nice balance between professional condescension to his everyman patient and admiration of Turner, the artistic genius.
Thank goodness, though, for Marion Bailey, as Sophia Booth, Turner’s landlady when he stays in Margate. In this case, ignorance of Turner and his world made for a delightful surprise: I didn’t know he would return to Margate or that Mrs Booth, once she’s a widow again (Karl Johnson is excellent in the small role of her second husband), would subsequently become Turner’s mistress in London and an important character. Marion Bailey’s Sophia is a warm-hearted, gently eccentric woman. The gestures and vocal mannerism – Sophia suffixes her sentences with a strange little noise that’s half-laugh, half-gurgle – are, from the moment she appears, fully absorbed. Bailey develops her character more than any other actor in the film, including Timothy Spall. She has a great moment when Turner, early in their courtship, tells Mrs Booth that her profile puts him in mind of Aphrodite. ‘What, this old snout!’, she laughs in embarrassment but it’s the look in her eyes that’s so memorable – a look of incomprehension, fear that Turner’s making fun of her and hope that he’s not.
12 November 2014