Portrait Of An Artist As An ….Old Man-Timothy Spall’s “Mr. Turner” (2014)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Mr. Turner, starring Timothy Spall, 2014 

It is funny sometimes how I will select a DVD to provide some entertainment and perhaps as in the film under review Timothy Spall’s masterly performance in Mr. Turner some education. Usually I take my assignments from site manager Greg Green which is fine by me. Lately though after having completed in a shorter time than expected my serious if futile attempts to get well-known 1950s private detective Lew Archer into the Private Investigators Hall of Fame by any means necessary I have been assisting Laura Perkins in the background (I call it “unofficial adviser” and she “ghost” which might explain our professional relationship if not the personal one) on her on-going Traipsing Through The Arts series.     

The project itself which has an open-ended end date per order of Greg who has been pleased with Laura’s sometimes quirky take on various self-selected art works she wants to take a peek at started with a look at the notorious then (now yawn) painting that John Singer Sargent did of one Madame X in Paris. That painting got him, despite the dust in our eyes stiff his biographers have tried to throw our way, kicked out of Paris just before the howling high society mobs showed their teeth. Laura (and her “ghost”) had originally decided to concentrate on modern art, 20^th century art might be a better way to say it, under the seemingly tranquil theory that all such art, serious art, in that century was the “search” for sexual and erotic fulfillment (as opposed to other so-called theories about the “search” for the sublime, for disassociating form from line, pure abstraction, or that old chestnut for the rogues who have no other half-baked theory to offer, art for art’s sake. Having placed a well-deserved stake in Sargent’s heart we decided that some earlier definitive influences on the “moderns” should be investigated.

Hence this DVD film review on the late life of many initialed but let’s just call him Mr. Turner for review purposes once we had seen on a trip to the John Singer Sargent, oops, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on sunny Sunday afternoon his famous painting Slave Ship with its ghastly sick slave cargo thrown into the deep during the horrendous Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. Not only the subject matter moved us but the almost modern expressionist way he painted the scene told us we needed to include him in the precursors’ works.   

Here is how the trail wound down in getting actually getting this film, the pre-history if you like. I had been in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a while back to check out the big William Merritt Chase exhibition (the “based in America Sargent” according to the brochures, the already well-overblown Sargent whose presence at that museum is a scandal among those who expect a major generic museum to not corner itself into some single artist’s studio). While there I went up to the second floor of the old main building to look at the Monet works in all his pristine glory that the curators had put together in one room. (Monet like Sargent seemingly in every half-civilized museum on the continent but at least the art cabal at MFA corralled Monet in one room highlighted by his flirty wife in symbolic kimono.) I wound up going to the wrong room initially, the room where the 19^th Romantic artists were exhibited next to the Monets and noticed a striking seascape in flaming colors and went over to look more closely. That painting turned out to be J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship an incredible rending of the saga of a slaver captain’s dumping over sick and dead black slaves to grab some insurance money. Nice guy, right. That picture reminded me that I had read a review of the film under review about the life and times of the older Turner. Normally I am more of a 20^th century art devotee but something about the color schemes evoked made me want to check this film out.            

Biopics about a 19^th century artist, especially detailing the last twenty five years of his life would not off the top of my head be the kind of thing that would keep my attention. This one is an exception for one very good reason, Timothy Spall as Turner. Make that two very good reasons Spall and Turner’s later art as he moved away from strict representation of land and seascapes-witness Slave Ship. The most interesting part of the overall movie was the tension between Turner’s need to be alone in his thoughts in order to rending his artistic concepts and his very real pleasure in being a popular member of the usually stuffy Royal Academy.    

Since the film starts in the 1820s during the Regency period we only find out by indirection about his personal life. He never married but had two lovers (and who knows about any affairs or trips to the prostitutes who knew his name and proclivities), one early with whom he fathered two unacknowledged children and a later one shown in the film with the women where he would take off to gain inspiration for his later works (a sexual scene with his life-long and loyal housekeeper turns out to have been an example of what we now call “alternate facts” although no question our man Turner was a randy sort).     

The film is great in showing Turner’s dedication to his chosen profession including having himself tied to the mast of a ship during a storm to get the idea of such tempest and turbulence. Some of his painting like Sargent’s, and for that matter like Monet are best left behind but when he was “on” he was a painter’s painter. So Laura (and her “ghost”) were delighted with the film and happy to have included old Turner in our look at the precursors to the moderns.