Mr. Turner

In which I find myself utterly baffled by the critical worship of filmmaker Mike Leigh.

From this website, fair use.

Mr. Turner (2014). Grade: D+

I’m about criticize a well-loved moviemaker I do not love, and so I should offer a standard disclaimer: if you like these movies, may all the Gods bless you. Whatever piece of art or culture gives you joy, please enjoy it. I don’t care for the music of 1990s honky Long Beach punk/ska group Sublime — I hate it like I hate bedbugs — but if that music takes you to a happy place, and makes it easier for you to be the nice person you are, then it is good music for you, and I’m glad of it. It’s just not for me.

A very vivid memory I have is of going to see a Mike Leigh film, Naked, at Portland’s KOIN Center Cinema in 1993 (that theater closed in 2004). Naked was critically-adored, and I would see any movie so praised. (I sometimes still do, but I’m warier, now.) It was especially praised for the lead performance by actor David Thewlis.

Well, Thewlis was, indeed, impressive. (And still is, he’s a terrific actor.) He played an intelligent malcontent, someone who was bitterly angry towards everyone and everything. In some ways, he was a lot like me, at the time.

And I hated that f***ing movie and walked out after 15 minutes and I’m very glad I did.

There was no understanding, no insight into the character. It was the same level of comprehension you’d get from avoiding a mentally-unwell person muttering to themselves on a bus. You see them, it’s very vivid, but you’re not enriched by the experience. It doesn’t expand your awareness, for good or ill, of what or why human beings can be whatever they can be (which is really the purpose of drama).

At least I wasn’t out the price of a ticket, though. The KOIN Center had more than one screen. I walked into the one next door. It was about to start Six Degrees of Separation. Which I loved, and made me happier to be a movie fan than most movies before or since. Thank you, Stockard Channing!

Years later, I’d watch the entirety of Mike Leigh’s Another Year (also, critically-adored). I don’t quite remember the whole plot, but I remember it has very good actors Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in it, plus another I’d never seen before, Lesley Manville. Broadbent and Sheen are married and successfully middle-class; Manville is their loser friend who’s always around when you don’t want her to be and who drinks too much.

I hated it. I thought it was a contemptuous movie. There was, again, no insight into the character of the socially inept drunk. Manville was impressive, as Thewlis was in Naked, but I thought the movie was cruel and uncaring to a degree which made me actively dislike Mike Leigh and wish for him to take up a career making PSAs about picking up your dog's sidewalk s**t.

Still, enough time has passed, so I thought I might try Mike Leigh again. And I sensed some severe condescension in those other two movies, so I figured I’d be safe with one about 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner. After all, Turner was fairly well-off, and admired, so if the movie depicted him in an unflattering manner, it wouldn’t be condescending — you can’t really condescend to someone who was rich and successful, you can only criticize. And Timothy Spall is another actor I respect. (You might remember him for playing a human who can turn into a mouse, in a movie where David Thewlis plays a human who can turn into a wolf.)

And my guess was right, in one way. I didn’t HATE Mr. Turner. Aside from a few moments, it didn’t actively fill my soul with glum, sinking loathing. I just was utterly baffled by the thing. What, exactly, was the point? What, for two fugging hours and thirty fugging minutes, was the actual fugging point? It’s not entirely clear. I have a suspicion, though, and it’s not a flattering one.

I will give Mike Leigh one thing; he’s a skillful filmmaker. In terms of framing an image and knowing how to stage and edit a scene, he knows what he’s doing. You’d be surprised — or maybe you wouldn’t — how many critically-worshiped directors are just incredibly BAD at directing, using stupid visual gimmickry that only illustrates how inept they are and how fatuous their ideas. Leigh does not do this. He’s no friggin’ master of subtlety, either, there’s little more here than meets the eye. But he’s competent. He can do the job well.

There’s an opening shot that really got my hopes up. We see a windmill in the distance; in the foreground, amber waves of grain (or prairie grass, or whatever it is). Two women in Dutch bonnets walk along a trail from the side of the screen, and the camera pans upwards to a lone figure on a hill, eying the windmill and sketching. You assume this is the titular Turner, and you’re right. You also assume this is the epic beginning of an epic story, one that will justify being 150 minutes long. And that assumption is wildly incorrect.

It’s said, or used to be, that audiences will give any movie about 10 minutes before they start becoming annoyed or bored.¹ If that’s true, Mile Leigh does his damnedest to lose your attention soon after that engaging opening shot. We watch Turner, back in England, going about his daily business at home, and it’s like if you watched me waking up and doing the crossword for 10 minutes. It’s amazingly nothing. Except that Turner vewy vewy loves his Daddums (who he calls “Daddy” all the time) and is rude to his domestic staff and grunts a lot.

So, so much grunting. I do think Spall’s a good actor, but the effect of this movie is to make me think slightly less of his abilities (well done, Leigh — it’s always a bad sign when your efforts make someone enjoy an artist less than when your film started). Timothy Spall’s direction, here, the advice he received from Leigh, seems to be, always and entirely, “grunt more.”

Per Wiki, Turner was born into “a modest lower-middle-class family and retained his lower-class accent, while assiduously avoiding the trappings of success and fame.” So, which is it, Wiki? “Modest lower-class” or “lower-class”? (And I love Wiki, that’s only a mild nitpick, we’re all going to miss it when the totalitarians take it over or shut it down — and they will.) Perhaps the idea of all this grunting is to hammer home the idea that Turner kept his accent? Couldn’t that be done with, say, I dunno, fewer grunts? And while I realize the British class system is very complex and beyond my comprehension, anyone who can afford even one servant isn’t lower-class in any universe I can fathom.

The effect of all this grunting — and of Leigh’s thin script — is to make Spall’s performance as Turner less acting and more of an “act.” Watch Turner grimace! Hear him grunt! Look at how tightly-wound and bumbly he moves about! We’re not allowed to get the faintest notion about what’s going on inside his head. A documentary filmmaker is constrained by what the people being filmed choose to show for the camera. A dramatist doesn’t have that problem. So why does Leigh choose to show us Turner as if we’re watching a documentary about a man who shows nothing for the camera? Are we supposed to see it as Turner’s inner turmoil, or isolation? Maybe? Maybe not? He certainly seems to get a kick out of getting away with being rotten. That much comes through.

There’s a scene where Turner half-rapes his inexplicably devoted servant. If you’re an experienced movie viewer, the second this scene starts, you’ll know you can skip it. Just fast-forward to the end. You’ll know that the scene has utterly no purpose (not one you couldn’t have expressed much less crudely and viciously), that it’s there to be “unblinking realism.” For fugg’s sake, Leigh, blink.

But no — not blinking is the whole point. There’s a scene where Turner has himself lashed to a ship’s mast so he can see the full brunt of an ocean storm. It’s shown as his drive, his uncompromising vision! Well, in such a situation, you’d have so much water in your face that you wouldn’t see s**t. (And it’s at night, so it’d be pitch black, too.) The idea of the movie is that Turner may be a grumpy bore, and sometimes a hideously abusive monster, but he SEES so much.

I think this movie is made so that Leigh can brag, and critics will buy, that it “looks like a painting.” There’s “golden hour” shot after shot after interminable shot, and they’re all vaguely pretty, and they all look like art you might see hanging in a dentists’ office. If you went to the right sort of college, you’d probably be able to identify how this shot or that one looks like this or that style of painting, or of Turner’s painting itself. I didn’t go to the right sort of college. I just think, “good work, cinematographer Dick Pope, and you have a very funny name.” (But really, given the Catholic Church’s obsession with people’s private lives, all popes are Dick Popes, in a way.)

There’s a few likable moments, and they total less than ten minutes in the film. There’s that opening shot. There’s a scene where Turner is posing for his first ever camera-taken picture, and he’s both fascinated by the machine itself and worried what it will mean for the future of painting. (It means someone will make a movie about how educated people should revere you long after you’re dead, that’s what it means.) There’s a few verses from a comic operetta Turner watches that looks mildly amusing.

And, my favorite, a short scene where Turner’s visited by a friend of his from Scotland, a self-educated woman who uses a prism to shine violet sunlight on a small needle. This magnetizes the needle; other colors of the spectrum won’t have the same effect. The scene’s here to demonstrate how in awe Turner is of sunlight. How its powers can seem magical. “The sun is God!,” Turner later croaks on his deathbed (then croaks.)

That Scottish woman — played by Lesley Manville, the meanly-treated alcoholic in Another Year — was a real person, Mary Somerville. Who was a well respected mathematician and philosopher of her day. She was one of the first women granted (honorary) admission to the Royal Astronomical Society, and a staunch suffrage advocate. Why not make a movie about her, instead?

Or a movie about Turner’s maid, who he misuses so rottenly. Surely, there would be a reason she stuck with the guy? (Despite this film having a researcher, historian Jacqueline Riding, named in the credits, Leigh said the sexual abuse depicted here was not based on any historical evidence. So why the heck is it in here?) There’s a short moment near the end, when Turner is dying, and we see Dorothy Atkinson, as the former maid, covered in some awful skin blotches and trying to see Turner one last time — she’s turned away. It’s there just so you can go “how sad” and that’s it. We have absolutely no awareness of who this person was or what she felt. This movie’s 150 minutes long, you’d think there would have been room for that.

Nope! But we do see the scene where Turner, after “Daddy” dies, goes to visit a prostitute, and gruffly orders her about what state of undress to be in. So that he can sketch her, you see — what an Artist! And then Spall breaks into a sobbing, grunting moment of, I guess, grief for his dad. It’s him looking like a crying pig. Charles Laughton might have been able to pull this off… maybe. Maybe not, under Leigh’s largely heartless direction. He doesn’t seem capable of getting much in the way of genuine feeling to come across on the screen. Only the ugly feelings.

I want to bring up a director some of you may not know, Ken Loach — because he’s also a British filmmaker, and Mike Leigh’s contemporary. (Loach did retire in 2024, and is seven years older than Leigh.) I’ve seen a few films by Ken Loach I found terribly depressing. Heck, in The Wind That Shakes the Barley you have old friends ordered to murder each other (which can happen in a civil war). Sometimes I think Loach’s material is too grim.

But I’ve never felt a total lack of emotion, the way I do with Mike Leigh. When Loach’s characters are suffering, he feels what they’re going through. (Or at least gives you the sense that he does… maybe he’s faking it!) When that long-suffering maid is turned away in the last moments of Mr. Turner, I don’t feel Mike Leigh’s compassion or outrage. I feel like it’s a dramatic point being made because Leigh thinks it’ll get to ya — not because the material makes him weep.

Why do critics love this director so much? Are critics, too, pretty heartless? Did they watch Barry Lyndon enough times in college that they think the mean scenes in that one are the best of what movies can do? Or do they see Leigh’s stabs at drama as effective, as moving? If so, good for them.

Heck, the World Socialist Web Site (which I would tend to agree with on moral matters, if not on practical ones) loved this movie because Turner, offered a huge sum by a private collector, instead donated his life’s work to the public, and wanted it shown free of charge. If that’s why they like this movie, good for them, that’s a fair enough reason. But it’s not enough to make me like it.

I don’t think I’ll be seeing anything more from Mr. Turner’s Mr. Leigh. Maybe, after the sour taste of this one wears off, I might check out the Leigh movie about Gilbert & Sullivan. I did enjoy the little comic operetta scene in this. But maybe with two full hours, Leigh would mean up Gilbert & Sullivan, too.

A funny thing about the poster image up top, here. It’s from some sort of Arabic-language website with several poster images. When I clicked on one poster image, to make the poster bigger so I could save it, I got a new tab that opened up about child-support laws! In English! Well, J.M.W. Turner had two kids by a woman he didn’t marry (who we see him behaving nastily to in the movie). And the child-support site’s either written by a freelancer who does 10 of those things a day for virtually no money, or by AI that replaces freelancers. Just like Mr. Turner is worried that cameras will replace painters. So, ALL of that pop-up new tab was appropriate!

1. I can testify from personal experience that this did NOT apply to the first 10 minutes of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, a movie which had a gangster smearing feces on a naked man and then peeing on him, all within the first two minutes. I worked in a movie theater showing that film, and a LOT of people walked out; we also frequently had to clean up vomit. But that movie’s a rather extreme example. It’s also a great film and DO NOT WATCH IT I WARN YOU.

A friend of mine wanted to see it, and I got him into the movie, and he later told me he was high as a kite on LSD when he watched it. DON'T TRY THIS.