Review: Mr. Turner

City Paper grade: B+

Mike Leigh's biopic on English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner opens with a vivid Dutch sunset, where two women walk against the backdrop of a windmill and a sky hued purple and orange. The shot ends on the rotund, top-hatted silhouette of Turner himself, as if the artist has strolled into one of his own canvases. Any suggestion that the beauty of the art is embodied in the person of its creator is quickly dashed, however, by Timothy Spall's grudgingly articulate portrayal. Spall's Turner expresses himself through a range of grunts, growls, purrs and cackles as vibrant and subtle as the colors in his palette, albeit with the opposite effect. His cockney-accented voice emerges buoyantly in jibing give-and-take with his fellow artists, but devolves to a sub-verbal level the more genuine the situation. The artist is depicted as having a violent appreciation of beauty, driven to expectorate his emotions — literally, in some cases, as he spits on a work in progress while stabbing at it with his brush. Sex for Turner is sudden, brusque and rutting; while hurt, as when the British public mocks his ethereal later canvases, is expressed via an intensification of his perpetual glower. Leigh foregoes the cradle-to-grave biopic approach, leap frogging through the last quarter-century of Turner's life to focus on the ugly, earthbound realities behind the artist's increasingly diaphanous work.