FILM REVIEW. AUF WIEDERSEHN BAFTA

I'll try this again, gremlins ate it, the last time, just as I finished;  the Accursed Universe,  made infinitely more accursed by our steps in cyberspace.  I loved the film and the more distant it becomes the more I dwell on it, speak of it and love it the more; maybe, this time of writing, ten days on, I'll figure it out, more better, as the NewPeople say.

Anyone who saw even a fragment of an episode of the series in which Timothy Spall and his ditzy wife almost suicidally sailed their decrepit Thames barge, Matilda, around the British Isles 

 

Look, dear, ain't them rocks, dead ahead?

 would have been amazed that he could remember a line, hit his marks or manage to do-up his flies when appearing in a proper film.  Tim was paranoid ineptitude personified and

Where are we?  'Ow should I know, sweedart?

Don't you know?

 if, messing about in boats,  you ever see the Princess Matilda bearing down on you,

 

give her a wide berth. 

 Tim, however, in Mr Turner, Film Four's Mike Leigh biopic of the painter,  gave a thundering performance, proving mrs ishmael's dictum that they are just dumb, empty vessels, luvvies, there to serve writers and directors and all the other properly clever people in cinema - the costumiers and set-builders, the make-up artists and the dialogue coaches;  after two years preparation, Tim, as Turner,  never put a foot wrong.

 Benny Cumberbatch, as long as he lives, will never turn in such a performance, it takes a rare dedication to immerse one's own self so, maybe it is that  emptiness within those capable of great cinema acting which we see here;  those deemed great - or at least greatly popular - stars like Michael Caine, manage, in everything they do,  to be enough of themselves, enough their own brand to satisfy their fans  and producers and Caine, always threatening to leave the UK should Labour regain power -  never mind, Mick, you'll be off soon enough, anyway - Caine is on record as saying that all he ever wanted was lots of money and some Oscars, and now I got 'em, a cheap, vulgar man; can't quite see Spall having the nerve to say that and as Turner, he was absolutely nothing of himself or any of his previous characters; instead,  he was a succession of contradictory characteristics which we must assume contained Turner - 

a devoted and dutiful son,

 

a neglectful, tight-fisted  husband and father, 

   an  ebullient Royal Acamedician
 

 

a brutish lover who  cruelly  betrayed his Chelsea housekeeper-mistress, not before giving her syphillis,

yet finding Thames-side domestic harmony 
 
 ".....off with you, woman, and bustle about."

as common-law husband 
to his former Margate landlady. 

Turner's reputation rises and falls, at one time he is seen as the butt of cruel music hall jokes about his increasing fascination with splurges of light  


which he executes


 instead of continuing to paint the representational land

 
 and seascapes for which he is famous.   

Skulking out of sight at an exhibition he overhears a youngish Queen Victoria and her ponce, Albert, deriding his art like the dreadful, crass German philistines they were.

Train, rain, steam and speed, 
Great Western Railway 1844;

Their Royal Krautnesses were not amused.

 Neither loveable nor honourable, Mr Turner is a hugely gifted Everyman, played without hauteur or artfice by Spall, farting, grunting, phlegmatic and taciturn, yet dazzling for all that.

  

Mr Turner, as you would expect, was painterly from the opening shot, two Dutch matrons walking a canal bank while Turner sketched a windmill; exquisitely located, set, costumed and lit, it was as though in every scene a Vermeer or a Rembrandt had come slowly to life;  every  scene  emerging from a composed and framed moment.

 

 

Mr Turner was as lovingly coloured as was Peter Webber's 2003 speculative study of Vermeer, 

 Girl With The Pearl Ear-ring,

and although the Turner interiors were more flatly coloured, more distempery, they were probably more accurate, you could almost reach in and feel the crackling, the imperfection.  The furniture, too, was what we would now call distressed, it being a utility common-place to the Victorians, the mahogany sideboard we would these days cherish,

 as I do, here,

 was all kicked about and scuffed, scratched to fuck.
Just in its portrayal of the daily, Mr Turner was a message from another world. Mr Death appears three or four times and his recruits are accorded a deep, unsentimental respect, a sensibility galaxies away from the crazed, mawkish garage-floriculturalism of our trashy times.

There was much, also, of the painter's preparatory doings, 
 
sourcing the paints, 
Cobalt Blue from far, expensive Afghanistan, 

sizing

 and securing  the canvases

and most importantly finding, chasing the light
and being its servant

windows loom large in this telling of Mr Turner's life and death, as they did, anyway,  for nineteenth century man and woman but especially so for a painter. Damien Hirst 

Tracey, a portrait of the artist as a young drunk.

and Tracey Emin and their brutish  patrons, 
worthies such as Saatchi and his trollopy cook wife.

An art collector's caress.

would have us think that art was simply  whatever you can get away with, in exchange for whatever you can charge; 
indeed Saatchi and his grubby mates have ensured that these days people applaud not the work but the price it fetches at some crooked auction house, like Sothebys, peddling investments to Russian criminals. Y'know, Tatler people.   They do do that, they stand up and clap the money.

 
Mr Turner reminds us that there is a good deal more to it than spunky sheets and bifurcated sharks; technique, knowledge and practice not being Oh, y'know, like s-o-o-o optional.

And however unwholesome his customs and practices,  Turner, towards the end, decidely unEminently, eschews a proferred fortune and instead bequeaths his collection of canvases to the British people, the Turner Rooms in the Tate Gallery 

now a series of spaces transcending the normal boundaries of painterliness.


There is a scene in Mr  Turner in which he and some friends are rowed across the path of the Fighting Temeraire, being towed by a steam tug to the scrapyard and which, taken with the dialogue, is more movingly expressive of change, decay and progress  than anything Turner, himself, painted; one could weep, foolishly, for a pile of old timbers and ropes. Stuff, by its familiarity, imports a value much greater than its assumed value, by owning - or stewarding - something, we add value; Time and familiarity apply their own burnish. Turner's desolate view, in the original,  of the redundant Temeraire, teaches us that. 

  

 It is often said that the truly honourable among us are those who decline the baubles of the Queen's Birthday Nonsense and that must also be true of LuvvieWorld. Save for some at Cannes, Leigh and Spall won no  glittering prizes, yet theirs is one of the most powerfully moving, informing and utterly charming films ever to have lifted me upwards and onwards.

If only Mike Leigh had spent his creative life on subjects such as this, instead of the perfectly horrid Abigail's Party and Nuts in May...if only, but then, those horrors led him here. He wins no Baftas or Oscars.  In Mr Turner there are no car chases, no porn, no violence, unless, of course, you count Life's inevitabilities - the passing cruelties of the Accursed Universe.

  These stills are an injustice; if you cannot visit the Turner Rooms, if you are interested in painting - or in the extra-Hollywood potential  of  cinema - you could do worse than losing yourself in this expert tapestry. It is the sort of art and craft which makes one consider buying a big home cinema system but it'll do on any old DVD player.
Mike Leigh's Mr Turner is a picture no artist could paint.