Mr Turner

Mike Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall) is like Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (Mozart): a vulgar boor blessed with a divinely inspired genius. Those extremities encapsulate the basic human condition: we start with animal urges but strive for ethereality.

As Spall plays Turner, his language parallels his art. He grunts, growls and snorts like an animal, but bursts into period polysyllabics, using words with which even the noblemen are unfamiliar. He paints with spit and daub but tosses off brilliant insights for his Academy colleagues to improve their work. 

He boar-like ruts with his adoring housekeeper. In parallel scenes his father shaves a pig’s head, then the artist. A man of excessive and coarse flesh, Turner in his art moves away from the physical and towards the ethereal and abstract. As his doctor prescribes, “Rest the body and the soul will find solace.” Turner is driven to leave off painting the material world and to try to catch light.

      The art and general community are less accepting. Queen Victoria dismisses Turner’ art as “vile,” others call it rubbish, and he becomes the butt of music hall comedy. 

Of course that is the traditional plight of the artist. The best see beyond the current conventions and market expectations so their vision requires they court rejection. Turner resists the market temptation to the point of rejecting a 100,000 pound offer for all his work, preferring to bequeath them to the nation (the Tate has them still).

The film begins and ends on images of women working while Turner stands apart, an outsider, looking and translating the world into art. After he dies his second wife Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey) keeps scrubbing her windows in their Chelsea home, preserving his passion for clear vision, smiling in memories of her third husband. 

Meanwhile, his unfortunate housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson) stumbles through the dark home Turner vacated, closing the door to seal the film’s darkness. Hannah is dying from scrofula and was simply abandoned by Turner, despite her love for him, his occasional bonk, and her having learned to help him with his paints after his father’s death. Turner rejects his own wife and daughters because they had no sense of him either as a person or as an artist. Mrs Booth appreciates his “little pictures” but has an insight and appreciation of the man, even if she doesn’t get the art.

Despite his callous treatment of his women (including his rather rough courtship of Mrs Booth), Turner has a sensitive side. He forgives an irksome painter’s debt. When he meets Ruskin’s still virgin wife he intuits her loneliness and predicts the vapid critic will discover love for her. Turner’s pain at his little sister’s death seems to prompt his tears when he draws a splayed young prostitute and when he tries to sketch a young woman drowned at sea. 

As the latter evokes the drowned Ophelia, it may be Turner’s aversion to sentimentality that drives him away from Academic painting. Or he may simply be appalled by the suffering of innocence. The advent of the pre-Raphaelites’ sensuous materiality in the late Royal Academy show suggests Turner knows his time has passed (as he defended Claude Lorrain, "a man of his time," against Ruskin’s dismissal). Of course Turner’s abstraction would only explode in the next century. 

Touched by Mr Booth’s traumatic experience shipping over African slaves, Turner paints that vision into a large work.  In order to experience a storm Turner has himself lashed to a mast. By intensely experiencing the physical world he discovers the ethereal. In his last words Turner laughs off Ruskin's intellectualizing of Turner's light: "The sun is God. Ha Ha."

     The film’s very impressive set design and photography serve Turner’s art. The densely detailed street scenes and interiors represent the representational tradition, the shots of skies, countrysides and dusks and dawns Turner’s abstraction. In fact the film’s narrative line evokes the impressionism Turner prefigured. Incidents happen scene by scene, often without links or continuity, creating a cumulative effect not directly related to any one part. Contrary to the Royal Academy “critic,” Turner was not “losing his eyesight” but gaining new vision.