Mr. Turner

Mr. Turner is a biopic written and directed by Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky). Timothy Spall stars as artist J.M.W. Turner, and the supporting cast includes Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Lesley Manville, and Martin Savage. The film premiered in competition at Cannes this year where Spall won the award for Best Actor and cinematographer Dick Pope received a Jury Prize for his work.

MR. TURNER explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies. Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

“Turner the man was eccentric, anarchic, vulnerable, imperfect, erratic and sometimes uncouth,” Leigh explains. “He could be selfish and disingenuous, mean yet generous, and he was capable of great passion and poetry. MR. TURNER is about the tensions and contrasts between this very mortal man and his timeless work, between his fragility and his strength. It is also an attempt to evoke the dramatic changes in his world over the last quarter century of his life.

Mr. Turner is rated 14A.

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