Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Timothy Spall, Paul Jesson, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Karl Johnson, Ruth Sheen, Sandy Foster, Amy Dawson, Lesley Manville, Martin Savage, Richard Bremmer, Niall Buggy, Fred Pearson, Tom Edden, Jamie Thomas King, Mark Stanley, Nicholas Jones, Clive Francis, Robert Portal, Simon Chandler, Edward de Souza, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, James Fleet, Patrick Godfrey, Karina Fernandez, Alice Bailey Johnson, Alice Orr-Ewing, Veronica Roberts, Michael Keane, James Norton, Nicola Sloane, Joshua McGuire, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Stuart McQuarrie, David Horovitch, Fenella Woolgar, Sinead Matthews, Tom Wlaschiha, Lee Ingleby, Mark Wingett, Sam Kelly, Nicholas Woodeson, Elizabeth Berrington.
There is no doubting that Mike Leigh can weave together a tale of passion with the clarity of an artist. It’s just sometimes you cannot help but want more, perhaps just the slimmest morsel available to chew on in further recognition of the subject he is placing upon a modern canvas, the smallest piece of information to show why the person is so important to modern life. It’s all well and good looking at the last 25 years of the prodigious painter’s time in Mike Leigh’s latest cinematic consumption, Mr. Turner, but just exactly where was the man who became the legend?
A man of great vision, of romanticism and one who courted controversy with a smile and with great pains to keep the façade going of someone who truly only cared about the next work of art, he was also a great thinker, someone who could see the light in any darkness and turn it to the point in which a masterpiece would appear.
In a film that seemed to call upon a whole host of British names in which to convey the story, some who could be argued as being big enough stars in which to merit more air time than they received, such as Lee Ingleby, Sylvestra Le Touzel, David Horovitch, Nicholas Woodeson, the much missed Sam Kelly, Fenella Woolgar and of course James Fleet, who surely should have dominated the screen even for a short while longer as Turner’s fellow artist John Constable; it was the relationship on screen between Timothy Spall, Paul Jesson and Marion Bailey which caught the eye and cleansed the pallet.
The love between father and son, between artist and greatest admirer was a relationship so adored that both Mr. Spall and Mr. Jesson was one in which nobody could have topped and the last great love of Turner’s life, the woman who kept him going in his final years, Sophia Booth, portrayed with stunning conviction by Marion Bradley. The only problem was the antagonism that existed in life between Turner and the mother of his two daughters was not shown in the depth that surely should have been demanded. A person’s life cannot be measure what happens in the final years, drama comes before that, the fall out between family, between friends, especially John Constable, why he had taken in a relative as his housekeeper and the destructive appetites that followed.
Mr. Turner, despite the brilliance on screen, especially that of Timothy Spall who took method acting to new heights in readiness for this film, despite the sheer work of art captured in the smallest of detail and the beauty of cinema behaving like a portrait, didn’t quite carry enough within all it s panoramic vision to give the whole truth behind the man and the artist.
A great film but somehow tinged with a lost opportunity, a real shame.
Ian D. Hall