Mike Leigh’s film has garnered almost unanimous praise, as much for Timothy Spall’s rendition of Turner’s later years as for Leigh’s ability to conjure up the artistic process on screen.
Leigh’s film gives us Turner’s last 25 years; his finest as an artist. He had already gained fame and fortune by his early twenties and was given membership of the RA as the precocious age of 26. This young man is the comfortable Turner we all know, the one who paints gently idyllic scenes and doesn’t frighten the horses.
But it is the later years of Turner’s life, when he could have settled for comfort as a successful establishment figure, that Leigh turns his lens on; the years when Turner became a delirious visionary who raised the hackles of the establishment.
It’s a weirdly spineless film then if you consider that Leigh conveys little of the fury and disapproval that Turner managed to generate in these last climactic decades of his life. And it explores precious little of how or why Turner was able to forge himself into a painter of genius.
Yes Leigh creates wonderful set pieces of Victoriana: Turner’s house in the west end of London, the Margate seafront filled with fishermen, and the house where he lodges with Mrs Booth. Yes, Leigh offers us screenfulls of scrumptious colour and texture and then deliberately pans away and reveals not the painting but real life as seen by the painter. And yes Spall, who has turned into Britain’s answer to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, brings veracity to Turner’s cockney geezer as he grunts his way across the screen.
Leigh is also spot on with his lens focused on the gap between Turner’s flawed life and his work as a painter. We see Turner pawing and randomly screwing his housekeeper. We see him spurning his (unacknowledged) daughters and their mother. We see the gentle relationship with his ‘daddy’ whom he has turned into his servant. We hear an aside about his mother who was incarcerated in Bedlam where she died. We see his growing attachment and deep love for his Margate landlady.
It’s all marvellous and worth seeing and in so many ways reveals the daily grind of the painter. And yes, I would see it again.
But, and this is a big but, how did this man, who is portrayed as nothing more than a harmless eccentric , transform from the brilliantly successful youth into the Turner who so set the critics against him that his greatest triumph, The Slave Ship, became his greatest debacle?
Leigh’s film ends up as a series of episodes without the sound narrative necessary to penetrate the weightier darker themes of Turner; the Turner who spits up phlegm and rubs it into his paint to give it texture.
It is this Turner, the mad visionary who paints conflict and blood, the first truly modern British painter who anticipates the future, who is missing from Leigh’s film.