Portrait of the Artist: Mr. Turner

Artist biopics are clearly not the most exciting of cinematic genres - thought they keep trying (Pollack, Vermeer, Kahlo) - and it may be faint praise but Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner is one of the better. Though he's done biopics before (of WS Gilbert, e.g.) he's best known for his semi-improvisational accounts of contemporary British life - Another Year, most recently - and the biopic will obviously not have the freedom of form and expression that Leigh imbues into his films and his cast (some of the cast from Another Year have roles in Mr. Turner - the lead played by Timothy Sprall, quite well, if you can tolerate a lot of grunting, snorting, and mumbled lines nearly unintelligible, at least to this American). After a somewhat slow start, we do get a picture of a troubled artist genius - and not troubled in the typical dramatic, bipolar, struggling for success against a hostile world mode but just a disturbed man, anti-social and secretive, hostile to women (up to a point) and then quite docilely falling in love with a woman who's certainly no raving beauty, cruel to (some of) his family and loyal to others, most notably his ebullient father. All that would be of little interest except that Turner was such a great artist - and Leigh has a terrific feeling for that, in fact the best scenes are those that show T at work - en plein air - with many scenes of extraordinary beauty, perfect counterparts if not re-creations of beautiful Turner landscapes and water-scapes - sketching all the time, working frantically in studio, and probably the bests scene in the film: the many artists gathered in a gallery putting finishing touches on their work in preparation for a grand exhibition - a scene full of rivalry among artists and devotion to craft. It's obvious that T was far ahead of his time - but Leigh doesn't romanticize that and makes it clear that he had many supporters and was well aware of his place in the history of art. From the little I've read after watching the film, it appears that Leigh stayed fairly close to the facts of T's life, save for some narrative compression of characters; he chose to focus on the latter part of T's life - nothing about his childhood or early fatherhood - which is probably what makes the film - focusing on the artistic accomplishment rather than a dutiful lifelong bio such as the Ray Charles or Johnny Cash recent artist-biopics. One key element that Leigh brings in subtly is T's uneasiness with the modern world (steamships, railroads, photography) and how that affected his painting. One mis-step I think was spending so much time on the pathetic minor artist who borrowed money from T and was a total ingrate.