TwitView: a beautiful look at a beastly man. Pope’s cinematography is glorious, and Spall’s lived-in performance is a wonder. A-
I enjoy art, but I don’t know much about it other than what I like to look at, and what I don’t. The art of J.M.W. Turner is alive with color, shadows and emotion. But Turner himself was a hard man to stomach, if the film Mr. Turner is to be believed. [And it seems as though he may have been much colder and brutish than this film allows.] For folks like me who are new to the particulars of this artist, Wikipedia sums up his massive contribution to the art world nicely:
“Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting…. He is commonly known as ‘the painter of light’ and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.”
Unfortunately, while his work is undeniably beautiful, the life he lived was anything but. A libertine, he cared little for rules of the day, or “proper decorum”. And director Mike Leigh shies away from none of it, giving us a look at a man who may have been a brute, but created beauty.
