Watch Mr. Turner For Free

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Blistering performances.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Having seen Leo McKern in an excellent TV movie about Turner titled "The Sun is God", I was eagerly looking forward to this film. For me, it failed on virtually every account. I wanted to know why Turner got out of bed in the morning to chase the sun and the light. I wanted to know what drove him to paint such wonderful pictures, and what technique he used. I wanted to feel his inspiration. I was appalled by the directors offensive portrayal of John Ruskin, who was an amazing man, a great writer, an ecologist (who took on the polluting Mill owners and struck a blow for the environment) a wonderful watercolour artist in his own right and a champion of Turner. The one redeeming scene was of The Fighting Temeraire being towed away on the Thames. This is often voted one of Britains favourite pictures, and there it was on the cinema screen, brought to life. Sadly - the incredible artist Turner was not brought to life - but reduced to a grotesque soulless caricature.

I saw the poster and DVD cover for this British film numerous times, I knew obviously it was about a painter, I've always liked the leading actor, and it was rated highly by critics, so I hoped for something really good, directed by Mike Leigh (Abigail's Party, Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake, Another Year). Basically this film looks at the last quarter century in the life of the great eccentric British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (Timothy Spall). JMW Turner was affected by the death of his esteemed father William Snr. (Paul Jesson), he is loved by his housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who he takes for granted and occasionally uses for sex, and he forms a close friendship and loving relationship with seaside landlady Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey), with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he died. Throughout his life Turner was a controversial artist, travelling across the country painting many great Romanticist landscapes, some paintings also had negative reaction, he stayed with the country aristocracy, visited a brothel, became a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, had himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he could paint a snowstorm, and he was both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty. Also starring Karl Johnson as Mr Booth, Another Year's Ruth Sheen as Sarah Danby, Sandy Foster as Evelina, Amy Dawson as Georgiana, Secrets & Lies' Lesley Manville as Mary Somerville, Martin Savage as Benjamin Robert Haydon, Richard Bremmer as George Jones, Niall Buggy as John Carew, A Knight's Tale's Roger Ashton- Griffiths as Henry William Pickersgill, Joshua McGuire as John Ruskin, Robert Portal as Sir Charles Eastlake, Clive Francis as Sir Martin Archer Shee, Simon Chandler as Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, The Vicar of Dibley's James Fleet as John Constable, Fenella Woolgar as Lady Eastlake, Peter Wight as Joseph Gillott, Happy Valley's James Norton as Clarinettist and 'Allo 'Allo's Sam Kelly as Theatre Actor. Turner may have been controversial in his time, but he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting, he is renowned for his oil paintings, but also did great watercolour paintings, his most famous painting is "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up", which appeared in the gallery scene of Skyfall, and will appear, with Turner (beating British greats like Sir Charlie Chaplin, Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Beatrix Potter), on the £20 note by the year 2020. Spall gives a wonderfully odd performance as the majestic painter, the supporting cast all do their parts fine as well, this is not a conventional biopic as such, it is deliberately fragmented and sketchy, I admit I found it a little long, and slow in places, but overall it was an interesting biographical drama film. It was nominated the Oscars for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Music for Gary Yershon and Best Production Design, and it was nominated the BAFTAs for Best Cinematography, Best Make Up & Hair, Best Costume Design and Best Production Design. Good, in my opinion!

It's the first half of the 19th century. Mr. Turner (Timothy Spall) is a grumpy respected painter in the Royal Academy of Arts. His newest unconventional style causes controversy. His beloved elderly father dies. His children's mother hates him. His housekeeper Hannah Danby is his sometimes sexual outlet. He rents a seaside room and has an affair with his landlady Sophia Booth after her husband's death. His many friends include scientist Mary Somerville, rare for her times, and bitter failing painter Haydon.This is not a plot driven movie. It takes a couple of hours before the drama starts to pick up. This is very much about Spall's immersive performance. The character doesn't really change. After 15 minutes, one gets the full sense of his personality. The movie is generally slow with a few explosive scenes. The exhibition scene with the many Academy artists paint a complete picture of Turner and his place among his peers. This is a brilliant performance looking for a more intense plot.

In this film, Mike Leigh is telling us that, while doubtless "beautiful inside", not all artists are gorgeous physically, and not all of them have (or are surrounded by) either beauty or particularly high standards of behaviour. As the years pass, we their admirers have turned these people into saints or gods that they never were nor could have been. The Director tends to push (at times even flog?) this idea to its limits, and perhaps beyond them, given that real-life depictions of the young Turner suggest a moderately good-looking man (in the film we see the middle-aged version onwards - Turner's quite impressive dates were 1775-1851). In some sense, then, we are back with the portrayal of Mozart by Tom Hulce in "Amadeus". However, "Mr Turner" lacks the dramatic sub-plots of the latter film, and the man of the title is not given to buffoonery. In general, our hero is far more down-to-earth, even if his paintings may conceivably be greater (and more revolutionary) works than even Mozart's music. What this film does have is very interesting handling of the title role by Timothy Spall, plus numerous snippets of real history. Hence JMW Turner here is a more-nuanced character, being a bit crude and lusty, for example, but also very hardworking, basically kind and charitable, knowledgeable of the world, and extremely fond of his supportive father (a former barber skilled at his trade and able to make some money, as is his son, but trapped irrevocably in the lower classes). Turner the son, on the other hand, bridges some of the class divisions through his "push", worldly-wisdom and of course sheer brilliance, as well as his relative wealth and his fundamentally amenable - if gruff/brusque - nature. How much of this positive side to the film is the real history and how much Spall's portrayal is a little (nicely) hard to determine, but it seems the "facts" of history are stuck to fairly closely, and (what one imagines is) a SUPERB job is done of portraying the increasingly-assertive, full-of-achievement/talent, but also rough-and-ready Britain of those times, warts and all. One can enjoy (and even be moved by) scenes during which Turner comes into contact with other figures from his day who have gone on to become (as) legendary for their influence on British and world art, and indeed history in general (John Ruskin, 1819-1900, might be a classic example, and of course there is also a brief encounter with John Constable, 1776-1837). There are moments in the film when Turner's greatest paintings (notably "The Fighting Temeraire" (1838) and "Rain, Steam and Speed" (1844)) are anticipated directly, but there are also a number of shots in the film (notably of people at doorways looking out to the sea) in which Mike Leigh seems to have turned the film stock into canvas, and there is still enormous beauty in the midst of all that dirt and disease and lack of hygiene. All credit to him for that, and for giving us such an accurate and fascinating - if not always appealing - insight into the Britain of the years 1820-1851.