Mr Turner, Cannes Film Festival - film review: 'Timothy Spall does his finest work in Mike Leigh's new film'

Mike Leigh's portrait of J M W Turner is an astonishingly detailed and richly enjoyable recreation of the Dickensian era
Obstinate and bristling: Timothy Spall as J M W Turner in Mike Leigh’s film
David Sexton16 May 2014

Lives of the artists rarely make great movies. There's an inevitability to the trajectory, an intransigent difficulty in making the act of creation convincing.

Mike Leigh’s new film, expounding the last 25 years of the life of J M W Turner, escapes these limitations almost miraculously, establishing its own world at once: painterly, Dickensian, an astonishingly detailed and richly enjoyable recreation of the era, but one that’s also immediately familiar as another slice of Mike Leigh himself, so class-conscious, awkward, affectionate and bolshie. It’s an act of recognition as well as imagination: a self-portrait too.

Leigh’s long-term collaborator Timothy Spall is Turner: stumpy, truculent and pug-faced, groaning and snorting like a pig, but completely confident in his art. In London, he maintains a fine house, looked after by his doting father William, a former barber (Paul Jesson, a complete treat) and a lop-sided scrap of a housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who loves him and whom he roughly exploits. She’s the niece of the woman who has borne his illegitimate daughters and been cast off, to her fury (“As ever, Sir, painting your ridiculous shipwrecks!”)

Meanwhile, Turner ventures among the aristocracy, rules the roost at the Royal Academy, and pokes fun at the affectations of the young Ruskin (Joshua McGuire, hilarious). Everywhere he goes, he’s always himself, vital and obstinate, even when his paintings are ridiculed, in the theatre and by the young Queen.

Leigh boldly gives us the big setpieces, his cinematographer Dick Pope brilliantly creating on film the scenes that become the grand canvases, The Fighting Temeraire, and Rain, Steam,

And Speed — The Great Western Railway. But the man we see creating these sublime visions remains uncouth, grunty and bristling — almost, as he says of himself, a gargoyle. It’s far and away Timothy Spall’s finest work, and even more a triumph for Mike Leigh, to have brought such artistry of his own to such an artist.

The Cannes Film Festival runs until Sun May 25, festival-cannes.com

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