Mr. Turner

Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner explores the last quarter-century of a superficially ordinary genius.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, played with gruff precision by Leigh regular Timothy Spall, remains perhaps the greatest painter England ever produced, a boldly remarkable colorist whose magically lambent land and seascapes seem anticipated and influenced the Impressionist style. He was also the son of a Covent Garden barber, who rose from those humble beginning to command a great house in London, in which he installs his dear daddy (Paul Jesson) and a drudgy housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson) with whom he satisfies the occasional sexual impulse.

Turner is portrayed as a man of simple, base appetites, a feral, grunting eccentric who suffers no boors and who exhibits a preternatural confidence in his own artistry. He is somewhat shielded from the world by his protective father and housekeeper, who deal with the paying customers who come to inspect the artist's latest works (Turner spies on them through a peephole), though they cannot prevent the occasional break-in by Hannah's aunt Sarah (Ruth Sheen), who is mother to Turner's illegitimate daughters Eviana (Sandy Foster) and Georgiana (Amy Dawson).

Turner's callousness with his intimates is contrasted with his generally friendly relation with the art world. His undeniable gifts have made him a favorite of other (lesser) artists in the Royal Academy, even if most of his peers regard him as a kind of savant, one of those gifted "naturals" who can spit and swipe at a canvas and still turn out visionary works.

If the general public has not quite caught up to the art world, well, Turner is at least famous enough to be satirized in Punch and Judy shows. No doubt a few Victorians received his increasingly cloudy and dreamy paintings with the suspicion that their kids could do as well.

Leigh, working in his typical, script-less way, manages in a few scenes -- with Spall-as-Turner speaking few intelligible words -- to sketch a portrait of a lonely, emotionally irresponsible man with a complicated relationship with money. It's an interesting and more than reasonably accurate portrait of the artist as an aging grump with one annoying misrepresentation. Leigh unfairly simperizing the art critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire), portraying him as a supercilious salon fop intoxicated by Turner's celebrity.

In truth, Ruskin was not only Turner's staunchest defender but had genuine and penetrating insight into the artist's work. His book-length essay Modern Painters, which essentially opined that the artist's loose, pre-fauvist style was truer "to nature" than the detailed works of the Old Masters, did much to cement Turner's reputation as the greatest British painter.

Leigh strings together episodes that explicate Turner's fascination with the mystical and scientific properties of light, the lengths to which he was willing to go to "observe" nature, and his somewhat awkward relationship with humanity. If that's all there were to it, it would make for a good enough movie, a period character study to go on the shelf with Leigh's 1999 comedy Topsy-Turvy, which focused on 15 months in the life of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But Mr. Turner shifts into a different, higher and more resonant gear when the grumbling, bearlike Turner visits the seaside village of Margate and encounters Mrs. Booth (Marion Bailey), whom he knows first as a landlady and later, after the death of her aged husband, as the great and redemptive love of his life.

In the end, Mr. Turner is a tremendous and problematic movie that ultimately rings with intelligence, sadness and a kind of validating generosity toward human foible. Even for the prickly and misunderstood, life can indeed be sweet.

MovieStyle on 02/27/2015