Mike Leigh's intriguing and spectacular Mr. Turner is an enigmatic film that baffles me. Ostensibly, the movie is a bio-pic, an account of incidents in the life of the great British painter, J.M.W. Turner. On first viewing, the long film seems formless -- episodes from the painter's life displayed in chronological order, but lacking any sort of continuity. An actual life is not a narrative, of course, and lacks the clearly defined rising and falling action that we associate with a plot or story. True to reality, Leigh's film doesn't show events that sum to a plot. Indeed, I would argue that Leigh goes out of his way to eschew any sort of narrative and that, in fact, his film is defiantly non-narrative -- it has less actual continuity than a real life might possess. In the absence of a plot, the viewer might assume that the film is structured according to some other principle -- it might present sociological perspectives on the role of the artist in society (for instance, Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch) or might be thematically designed around certain preoccupations in the artist's work (for instance, Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo). But on first viewing of this long (2 hours and 29 minutes) and exceedingly complex film, I am unable to locate any thematic or conceptual structure to the picture. Some continuities are presented by Dick Pope's fabulously beautiful cinematography -- for instance, in one shot we see a close-up of Turner's hand texturing a canvas and, then, the image cuts to an extraordinary weathered cliff, a geological phenomenon that looks somewhat like the abstract squalls of paint on the artist's canvas. But these kinds of pictorial rhymes don't amount to any discernible subject. Accordingly, I am at a loss as to what, if anything, Mr. Turner means.
Mr. Turner starts in media res -- Turner, played by Timothy Spall, is middle-aged and already famous, if also a bit notorious for some of his eccentricities. He lives with his vigorous, elderly father, a man whom Turner calls "Daddy" and describes as "Covent Garden's finest barber." A timid housekeeper with bent shoulders and psoriasis cares for Turner's physical needs in all respects: periodically, Turner has sex with her or mutely puts one of his paws on her breast or crotch. As the film progresses, we see Turner sketching, painting his pictures, and watch him strutting about like a turkey cock in the halls of the Royal Academy on "varnishing day." His father dies and Turner goes to brothel where he bellows in sorrow, an inarticulate horrible sobbing sound. At a coastal resort, he meets the wife of a sea captain, a man burdened with melancholy and a bad conscience because of his involvement in the Atlantic slave-trade. The sea-captain dies and Turner begins a sexual relationship with his widow. Turner, then, sickens and dies -- the second harrowing, relentless death scene in the film. As he dies, Turner cries out "The sun is God," and amused by this remark, laughs a bit and, then, stops breathing. Leigh ends with three shots that comprise a kind of coda -- first, we see the sea-captain's wife polishing the window panes of a door, one of the few symbolic images in the movie; then, we are shown Turner in a flashback (the only one in the film) heroically standing against a glorious Dutch sunset and sketching in his book, third, we see Turner's servant, terribly disfigured by her psoriasis grief-stricken in the grey and gloomy chambers of the great artist's London apartment. This account, however, does not suggest the film's fantastic Dickensian richness -- the movie must have more than 60 speaking parts and we see dozens of encounters between Turner and members of his society: many of these encounters have a indelible strangeness, an uncanny core of mystery, that is enhanced because Leigh doesn't explain the encounters, provides no back-story, and, further, seems to demand that the encounters, which seem to provide an encyclopedic survey of Turner's life and times, are inconsequential -- they lead nowhere and have, little or no, narrative or plot significance. The film is resplendent with a profuse, wild generosity about the types of people that Turner encounters, but Leigh frustrates the viewer by developing intricate, closely observed characters and, then, simply abandoning them. The effect is like a novel by Dickens or George Eliot in which the novelist's imagination casts off remarkable minor characters with the greatest profligacy, but, then, discards them after they have interacted with the main figure in the story. Leigh shows us Queen Victoria and her German-speaking husband, Prince Albert; he presents us with an incredible variety of forgotten 19th century painters; we see the quarrelsome Haydon, an artist who is impecunious ("suffering impecunity" as the dialogue precisely states), the sort of romantic, half-mad genius that we are tutored to expect in a film of this kind, but a man with no talent at all. There are various society ladies, including a woman with a spectacularly irritating singing voice; she performs a slightly risqué song for a room full of aristocrats, causing a love-stricken dwarf to flee the chamber in morose, and panicked horror -- we have no idea what this about; it is one of those scenes in the film that rings true, but that has nothing discernible to do with Turner, simply an event that Leigh dispassionately portrays without any explanation. There is nobleman with a florid way of speaking and peculiar mincing gait, a funny walk like something imagined by the Monty Python troupe, who appears, utters something inane, and is, then, dismissed by an older nobleman, possibly the lord of Petworth manor as "a complete imbecile." We meet the Ruskin family, including the precocious John Ruskin who is incapable of pronouncing his "r" sounds, and who pontificates in an annoyingly pretentious manner. We see Turner abusing the long-suffering Constable and visit a brothel with the hero where he poses a singularly sorrowful, and half-comatose young prostitute on the bed before bursting into sobs over the death of his father. Two examples illustrate Leigh's method. In one scene, a cheerful and gregarious Scottish woman, clearly an admirer of Turner, discusses Newton's optics and, then, uses a prism to flash a rainbow into the artist's darkened studio; the woman claims that the violet light somehow magnetizes a needle and frets over the magnetic qualities of reds and indigos. The scene is fascinating, brilliantly staged and dramatized, and there seems to be an erotic undercurrent to the woman's presentation. But we have no idea who she is and, just as we are warming to her presence in the film, Leigh cuts to something else and we never see her again. At the end of the film, the ailing Turner staggers out of his seaside apartment on the stony shore; a suicide has been retrieved from the water and the dying Turner scratches images into his notebook with his crayon, sketching the bluish corpse lying in the gravel. We don't know who the woman is, why she drowned herself, and there is nothing really mortuary about Turner's art, most of which is devoid of any significant human presences at all -- the scene is mysterious, beautifully shot, and indelibly strange, but I have no idea what it means.
Two aspects of the film are extraordinary. First, all of the acting and speeches seem to me to be pitch-perfect. It is rare to encounter a film that seems so remarkably authentic to the period which it depicts. (That said, the film probably would be best seen with subtitles -- about a third of the dialogue was inaudible to me because of the heavy, apparently precisely observed and rendered accents.) All the cameo parts, and they are innumerable, are instantly convincing and memorable. Timothy Spall's performance as Turner is horrifying charismatic and gripping -- you can't look away from him, but, of course, the man is a mess: fat with a blubbery lips and the face of an aggrieved bull-dog; Spall inhabits the part with his whole body -- he marches through the squalid London streets leaning forward as if against a heavy wind, his top hat cocked rakishly to the side, a belligerent presence like a hound straining against its leash. Spall looks like Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame -- he is simultaneously brutish and spiritual; his great eyes shimmer with intelligence and beauty. He speaks in voice that is mostly grunts and barks, muttering as he struts around and, as the film progresses, Turner seems to become less and less communicative, more prone to express himself in a kind of growl -- he is literally phlegmatic -- his words gurgling somewhere in his mucousy barrel chest. The performance is extraordinary and horrifying. The second aspect of this film that is wholly remarkable is the extraordinary beauty of Dick Pope's camerawork. The wide-screen images are essentially conceived as a series of landscapes -- close-ups are rare and Pope shows figures in the center of complex interior spaces that read, somehow, like turbulent "landskips" or wandering through outdoors terrain that embodies the early 19th century notion of the sublime. The interiors are illuminated by raking light, light that imparts the lucid, analytical, yet subtle qualities of a Vermeer painting or a canvas by Chardin. The lighting allows us to grasp with palpable precision the exact textures of the cloth and wood and other household furnishings that we are shown: there are muted silk colors, a slight sheen on the cloth, and velvets, and old faded tapestry-like wall papers. Several of the exteriors are literally breath-taking, there is one image of the white cliffs of Dover with the sea crawling beneath that pale rim of escarpments like a writhing mass of quick-silver worms that almost knocks you out of your chair. Many of the interiors have the fussy, elaborate detail of a painting by Adolf Menzel -- all manner of curious objects arranged like the subject of a half-dozen still life paintings around the center of the image. Although Pope doesn't exactly compete with the vaporous hazes that Turner produced on his canvases he doesn't stint on showing us great landscapes with glowing voids at their heart. Because of the film's visual glamor, its incredible, and sinister, beauty, the movie must be seen in a theater with a large-screen. (I watched the movie at the otherwise execrable Uptown Theater, a pretentious movie theater that I despise, but I must say that the huge screen in that auditorium showed the film to excellent advantage.)
Mike Leigh's greatest films are mysterious objects to me -- they seem to revolve around some insoluble problem: there is young girl who mysteriously wants to die by anorexia in Leigh's savage and disturbing Life is Sweet, the mystery of collaboration between men who don't really like one another in Topsy-Turvy, the director's other bio-pic about Gilbert and Sullivan. I think of the inexplicable and frightening sadistic satyriasis in Leigh's Naked, one of the greatest and most puzzling movies ever made about sex, and, finally, the mystery of inexplicable optimism and happiness in Happy-go-Lucky. To this roster of films is added Mr. Turner, a movie about the ineffable riddle of creativity, a great movie, I think, but one that I don't understand.
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