Mr. Turner

With Mr. Turner, writer/director Mike Leigh brings his signature, organic, improvisatory technique to the musty old genre of English biopics. This beautifully photographed picture paints an engrossing portrait of the British artist J. M. W. Turner during the last 25 years of his life. The amount of biographical information available about Turner is relatively limited. By most accounts he was an inarticulate, unattractive man who lived a dull and rather anonymous existence. He lived during a time when people kept their private lives to themselves, leaving behind precious few details about either his working methods or his personal life. So you might think a filmmaker would have a difficult time creating a penetrating and enlightening biopic capable of holding a viewer’s interest for over two hours.  But Leigh develops his pictures from the bottom up and from the inside out. His unique, exploratory process allows his fictional films’ storylines to grow gradually throughout an extensive pre-production period in which he and his actors invent the characters and their situations. He changes little about this approach when dealing with real life subjects. Instead of building the narrative completely from scratch, Leigh and his cast began with research, developing their characters and scenarios around established facts and historical information. Rather than inhibit Leigh’s methodology, working from biographical investigations seems to enhance the result, as Mr. Turner is one of this celebrated director’s finest films.

Leigh is renowned for his collectively created dramas, satires, and elegiac comedies about the British working class—movies like High Hopes (1988), Secrets & Lies (1996), and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). Yet Mr. Turner is not the filmmaker’s first foray into the lives of historical figures.  In his excellent film Topsy-Turvy (1999), Leigh illuminated the theatrical partnership of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan during the period in which they produced one of their most memorable operettas, The Mikado.  Mr. Turner takes place a few decades earlier than Topsy-Turvy, but it is still set in the Victorian Era—a fascinating time in British culture in which writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot created their masterworks. Cinematic depictions of this era are plentiful, with prevailing attitudes, aesthetics, and other remnants of the age still very much with us. But Mr. Turner stands out amongst the countless number of upscale period pictures and television costume dramas produced in the last half century. Productions of this sort usually concern themselves with the specific situations of people and classes of people who lived during a time in history. They rarely focus on the peculiar personality quirks and idiosyncratic preoccupations of their individual characters, which is the way Leigh approaches his subjects. 

Timothy Spall—a veteran of Leigh productions since the BBC TV movie Home Sweet Home (1982)—gives a mesmerizing performance as Turner that recalls the great Charles Laughton at his peak. The portly, gravelly voiced Spall has acquitted himself superbly in well over a hundred supporting roles. He has demonstrated his skills playing a diversity of characters ranging from Winston Churchill in Tom Hooper’s The King's Speech (2010) to the contraband smuggling rat in Nick Park’s stop-motion animated comedy Chicken Run (2000). But besides playing Wormtail in the all-star Harry Potter series, Spall is best-known for his work with Leigh, and most notably his dramatic turn in Leigh’s Palme d'Or winning masterpiece Secrets & Lies (1996). Mr. Turner is Spall’s first part that can truly be called a major leading role, and he makes the most of the opportunity. Appearing in nearly every scene, Spall’s Turner is a complex individual full of curiosities and contradictions. A sublime romantic painter whose passion and emotion come through in his canvases, he’s often cold and dismissive of the people in his life. Though generally callous and disagreeable, he is capable of much generosity and affection. For much of the picture he communicates through a series of grunts, sighs, and guttural moans, while at other times his verbal eloquence is thoughtful, even poetic. We come to see the intelligent, curious, and deeply compassionate soul that resides just beneath the surface of Turner’s gruff, blustering persona. Though he lived in a distinctly dark and gloomy time of extreme poverty, disease, and industrial pollution, his colorful paintings usually evoke the warmth of nature and portray optimistic imagery of land, sea, and sky harmoniously coming together. Even seascapes depicting ships caught up in violent storms elicit feelings of elation and nobility in human efforts.

Mr. Turner is made on a grand canvas but at an intimate scale. The way Leigh and his longtime cinematographer Dick Pope shoot this movie echoes Turner’s paintings. Many of the widescreen compositions show the solitary Turner exploring magnificent landscapes and ocean vistas during the trips he often takes for inspiration. Yet the majority of the story takes place inside private homes and public buildings, where the filmmakers deftly convey a Turneresque world of interior landscapes. Pope’s lighting and color pallet recall Turner’s handmade paints. The movie represents seamless blending of old and new cinematic techniques. For the first time on a Leigh project, Pope shoots with digital cameras (the state-of-the-art Arri Alexa and Codex recording system) but achieves the picture’s romantic, painterly look primarily through natural lighting and vintage lenses—apparently the same Cooke Speed Panchro lenses used to record the first ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 and used by Stanley Kubrick to shoot Spartacus in 1960.  Like all Leigh films, most of Mr. Turner is shot on locations rather than sets. The breathtaking views the characters see outside the windows are actually there during filming as opposed to inserted later via green-screens. According to Pope, he and Leigh follow the strategy developed by Kubrick and John Alcott on Barry Lyndon (1975), “shooting in natural locations, and using almost only very mild external light sources, with little lighting in the scene itself.” All this attention to detail pays off beautifully as the picture bears no trace of the cold, over-enhanced artificiality that often marks movies whose look is manufactured in a post-production color suite. Mr. Turner gives the impression of an oil painting come to life. It should be seen on as large a screen as possible for maximum effect. 

The film has a leisurely pace, which seems unconcerned with rounding any of the usual biopic bases. This approach enables Leigh, Pope, Spall, and the rest of the cast to simply exist within the loose but finely crafted narrative, the way ships, lighthouses, and buildings draw focus yet never dominate Turner’s exquisite compositions. We experience the arc of the aging painter’s life through the unmistakable changes we see in his style and the subtler changes we observe in his late in life activities. Thus, the movie captures an undeniable feeling of life—not just at the time Turner lived, but a universal understanding of humanity in all its messy and sublime, unpleasant and joyous facets.  Unlike Ralph Fiennes’s stuffy, self-aware biopic The Invisible Woman (2013), which chronicles the life of Charles Dickens during a similar era and at a similar point in his career as Turner’s in Mr. Turner, Leigh’s film illustrates—but never explains—how much J. M. W. Turner was both a man of his time and a man far ahead of his time.