Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner

It is with some sadness that I report my disappointment with Mike Leigh's latest film, since he is one of the few directors whose new films I look forward to.  Mr. Turner is an incoherent mess.  The "biopic" of an artist is, of course, a most difficult proposition and the only one that I think is a glorious success is Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), which is mostly wonderful performances of Bach's music in original locations, interspersed with reflections on his life.  For a composer one can perform his music but for a writer or painter it is more difficult to showcase the work, and Mr. Turner is a series of sequences of Turner painting, and feuding with his fellow artists.  In Turner's paintings there is little room for humanity, but Leigh's film is full of endless close-ups of Turner and his women, with only occasional walks in the outdoors. 

Leigh has done a wonderful job, in films such as Secrets and Lies (1996) and Vera Drake (2004), of exposing the absurdities of class distinctions in England.  But his Turner film has little of this, other than to briefly dwell on Turner and his father, a barber.  The film does not tell us the date and place of each scene, which is all to the good, but it also does little to indicate what the time and place is, even if one is thoroughly knowledgeable about Turner's career.  The series of anecdotes -- Turner with a female Scottish scientist, Turner at the Royal Academy feuding with Constable, Turner singing Purcell -- are given little context or meaning.  Turner himself is boorish and inarticulate, speaking mostly in a series of grunts.

One would not know from this film what a great artist Turner was, because paintings are not shown to great advantage on film: the texture is entirely missing.   Certainly Turner has a great ego -- something that seems necessary for an artist -- but there is little attempt here to understand or communicate what made him a great painter; Dick Pope's pretty cinematography is very much beside the point, though it glows beautifully on the big screen at the Angelika.