Review of Mr. Turner (2014) by Lori B — 12 Mar 2015

Mike Leigh is always a strange a divisive filmmaker, and quite possibly the only director who can get away with not giving one solid damn what his audience thinks. He's not about to jazz up a film like Topsey-Turvey with sex or intrigue just to win the Downton Abbey crowd, or make Happy-Go-Lucky the cookie-cutter rom-com a major studio would have implored him to.

Ever the outsider, the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award winner may never have another masterwork like Secrets & Lies, but he always churns out something unique, in this case crafting a biopic of JMW Turner that is exactly like one of his paintings: a placid but vivid landscape in which figures seem to move without any focal point or destination.

You could swear that buoy drifted, that blade of grass blew in the breeze, but in the end, you're not quite sure that it wasn't always there to being with. Such is the soul of the titular Turner in the film, who ends the film either a changed man or exactly who he was when we met him, leading us on a journey that may very well be a "still life".

And while the stellar performance of Timothy Spall and the astoundingly gorgeous cinematography of Dick Pope are undeniable, Mr. Turner, much like the work of the painter, is inarguable in a different way.

Though Joshua McGuire's John Ruskin (apparently borrowing Samuel L. Jackson's ridiculous lisp from Kingsman) tries to qualify and quantify the qualities of Turner's art, it's not flashy nor avant-garde, just like the film.

There's no neon colors or Warhol hipness. It is there, it is present, and if the viewer isn't hooked at first glance, drawn into the environment the artist has painstakingly crafted, then nothing, no argument nor examination nor intellectual posturing can shift them.

And for once, in the case of Mike Leigh, and in the vein of capturing Turner in the most appropriate of fashions, that's absolutely perfect.