Dec. 22--Some films assert their rightness and sureness in the opening shot. Mike Leigh's excellent "Mr. Turner" is one of them, though Leigh and his inspired cinematographer, Dick Pope, are less concerned with conspicuous camera movement than with a charged sort of stillness. It's a beautiful film, and not merely that. When it's over you feel as if you have been somewhere, to another century, peering at the world through a different set of eyes.
Now for that first shot. In 1820s Holland, a windmill dominates a pastoral landscape. The sun looms low on the horizon. Two women, chatting, enter the frame from the right and follow a path along a canal as Leigh's camera meets them, and then pivots to capture a lone man in a tall hat in the distance. He is sketching, head up to catch the sun, head down to interpret it on his notebook.
In this one simple image we are seduced into believing all we need to believe. This is the past brought to life, and Timothy Spall -- whose first close-up as J.M.W. Turner follows the opening shot -- makes the act of seeing and sketching a quietly compelling one.
"Mr. Turner" covers a quarter-century in Turner's life. After his travels abroad, Turner returns to London, to his doting father (Paul Jesson) and to his near-mute housekeeper (Dorothy Atkinson). The reunion talk is of the rising cost of paint and other workaday matters. Only when Leigh lingers for a second or two on Atkinson's face, and then on Turner's averted glances, do we sense the sexual current running between employer and employee.
Turner's life is willfully messy. He has a bitter ex-lover and two grown daughters he barely acknowledges, and soon Turner flees to the solace of a country estate. Then it's off to Margate and the seaside, where he grew up. Setting up shop with his easel and paint, he lodges with Mrs. Booth (Marion Bailey, superb in her dogged good cheer), whose husband is a retired seafarer. Turner offers an assumed name, Mallard, to conceal his somewhat famous identity.
From there, urged on by Gary Yershon's vital, astringent musical score, "Mr. Turner" reveals a bit more of the artist at its center in each scene. There are, however, no explanations and thesis points to be made. There's not a single speech in Leigh's improvisation-borne script gumming up the works with expressions of artistic intent. Spall never delivers an "Oscar speech"-y declaration of inner torment or creative passion. This is a procedural and a historical re-creation of a high order. It glides from home to Margate, from work to diversion, and new industrial marvels appear in Turner's life in their own good time.
One of the wittiest scenes brings the daguerreotype into Turner's life. As Turner and Mrs. Booth (now his domestic partner) sit before this strange camera, intimidated into a frozen posture and a fixed, profoundly uncomfortable expression, Leigh's instincts as a writer and a director prove unerring. The film runs 21/2 hours, and I wouldn't cut any of it. It's an eagle-eyed vision of a male-run universe that is nonetheless dominated by women. The housekeeper, Hannah, becomes the story's tragic figure, and it's to Leigh's and Atkinson's credit that the pathos is fully earned.
Spall, often grunting in displeasure, brings his performance right to the brink of caricature but backs away, always. At one point, Turner's 1838 painting "The Fighting Temeraire" comes to life on screen, as Turner floats by with some mates on his own craft. It's the end of an era, he notes, as a steam-powered tugboat ushers the old ship to its next life. Is this an image of defeat, or progress? Happy, or sad? It's too complicated to say, and without a speck of pomposity Leigh's film -- one of the year's best -- honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.
"Mr. Turner" -- 4 stars
MPAA rating: R (for some sexual content)
Running time: 2:29
Opens: Thursday
mjphillips@tribpub.com
