With his 2014 film Mr. Turner, writer/director Mike Leigh operates in a slightly different mode compared to many of his prior works. Whereas the majority of his movies have focused on everyday Londoners, Mr. Turner is centered on a very well-known historical figure, painter J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall). This is Leigh having a go at a biopic, but he doesn't sacrifice his usual emphasis on low-key interactions for the cradle-to-grave storytelling of most conventional biopics. Mr. Turner may see Leigh focusing on a different type of person than he routinely zeroes in on, but make no mistake, his brilliant gift for capturing everyday humanity is well-intact.
Mr. Turner starts off with J.M.W. Turner as a middle-aged man, one who focuses on his paintings with great care but does tend to isolate some of his loved ones, like his ex-wife. The audience follows Turner over the last 25 years of his life as he, among other occurrences, develops a relationship with a landlady by the name of Mrs. Booth (Marion Bailey) as well as simultaneously frustrate and astound other painters in his field. By focusing on these pieces of mundane interactions, Leigh is subtly conveying to the viewer that what's really important about Turner isn't necessarily the paintings that made him famous. It's his connections to other people.
Those connections are rendered in a complex manner that grounds Mr. Turner in unmistakable reality. Anyone expecting J.M.W. Turner to be rendered as a lofty figure free of criticism clearly has not seen any prior Leigh features. This famous artist is depicted as a person whose as abrasive as he is brilliant, as capable of committing social faux pas as he is putting paint on a canvas. Turner is capable of being an outright brute, of using people, like his housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), for sexual favors without thinking of them as human beings. He isn't perfect. Even Leigh's framing of Turner eschews grandiose tendencies. Rather than capturing him as some sort of mythical figure, Turner is always captured in a manner reminiscent of the people around him. He's just another face in the crowd and Leigh communicates that fact with quiet grace.
The fact that Turner is indeed just a mortal man weighs heavily on Mr. Turner's protagonist, particularly as he nears the end of his life. It is in these later sequences that the film reveals itself to be about a man convinced he and his paintings will be rendered a “non-entity” by countless forces outside of his control. As his final years flicker by, new technology like trains and cameras arrive, seemingly just to emphasize the looming obsolescence of J.M.W. Turner. While the man himself would never fully realize what his last legacy would be, the audience does get to witness just that in the final moments of Mr. Turner.
Here, we see Mrs. Booth and Hannah's differing reactions to Turner's demise. Booth is framed in sunlight, hanging clothes on a wire with a small smile on her face. The good times she shared with this painter linger in the mind like the last bit of snow enduring in the face of the hot sun. By contrast, Hannah is left alone in Turner's dimly lit home. It's clear she's in emotional distress over how Turner carried on a secret life with Mrs. Booth behind her back. This expression of quiet anguish is captured a great deal of distance away from the camera to suggest how far apart she and Turner were while he was still alive.
These two moments demonstrate that the titular lead of Mr. Turner did leave an impact on others that resonates after his death. One moment shows this impact in a positive way, the other demonstrates his lasting impact can manifest in a sorrowful way. The lingering legacies we leave behind are never as simple as “good” or “bad”, that’s not how human beings are, why should our legacies be so streamlined? Though this legacy may be messy, Leigh does allow these final glimpses to prove that this painter did not become a “non-entity” after he perished. It's a powerful way to end this movie and one that caps things off in an appropriately emotionally complicated manner.
That kind of thoughtful writing and filmmaking runs deep throughout all of Mr. Turner alongside Dick Pope's tremendously realized cinematography and an unforgettable lead performance from Timothy Spall. I can truly say there's no biopic quite like Mr. Turner. In shifting gears a bit for Mr. Turner, writer/director Mike Leigh has cemented his long-standing status as a true cinematic genius.
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