Star Rating:

Mr. Turner

Director: Mike Leigh

Actors: Paul Jesson, Dorothy Atkinson

Release Date: Saturday 30th November 2013

Genre(s): Biopic

Running time: 150 minutes

Telling the story of the last two decades or so of the fantastically talented painter J.M.W. Turner was always going to be something of a head turner for the awards givers, and it’s this Very Serious Movie Syndrome that proves to be Mr Turner’s initial attraction, before becoming responsible for it’s eventual (partial) downfall.

First off, Timothy Spall is absolutely phenomenal as Turner, completely giving his all for the role, to the point that his mumbled, gravelly dialect will take the first twenty minutes of the movie’s run-time to adjust to. Even from the tiniest of body language changes, we can tell how Spall’s Turner feels for his father (Paul Jesson), his helplessly in love housekeeper (Dorothy Atkinson) and a seaside landlady (Marion Bailey), the three other major players in this story. Between his interactions with them, we get to see Turner visit the Royal Academy of Artists, frequent local brothels and, in one stand out scene, get tied to the mast of ship at sea in the middle of the snow storm just so he can figure out how to paint it.

This is all well and good, but doesn’t prove to be a particularly cinematic story to tell, which is where director Mike Leigh pulls out another ace; cinematographer Dick Pope who presents each scene like it were a Turner painting, all gorgeously lit under impossibly beautiful cloudy skies. Even this visual distraction doesn’t warrant the film’s ungodly extension to two and a half hours, though.

Thankfully, Leigh injects some much needed levity throughout, as Turner’s wide variety of grunts used to express every type of positive and negative emotion are always good for a laugh. Seriously, if Spall doesn’t get himself an Oscar nomination for this, we’ll be thoroughly shocked, while every other aspect of the film will have to make do with the BAFTAs attentions.

Perfectly crafted and realised but way too overlong, we can already see this being played in classrooms, entertaining English Arts teachers and boring their students for decades to come.