STORMY WEATHER
The movie Mr. Turner gives us the person of J.M.W. Turner, not the painter, and that’s unfortunate. Because, as depicted here by Timothy Spall, he’s a cantankerous middle-aged coot with a crab-like shuffle who communicates, when he cares to, in caveman growls. He neglects his adult daughters, sexually exploits his maid, bullies potential patrons, and insults fellow painters. Maybe the warts-and-all portrait is meant to show that beautiful things are often created by unbeautiful people. But, except for the tenderness he shows his father and his mistress, we see little more than the warts.
More confusingly, we don’t see the things that make Turner a great painter: vision, discipline and passion. I can’t believe that the doltish half-man in this film could have painted the way Turner did. In the movie we see Turner stabbing the canvas with brushes, scrubbing paint off it with rags, spitting into its surface, smoothing patches with his fingers, and blowing pigment across it from the palm of his hand. But we don’t ever see him paint. That is, we don’t ever see him look deeply into the world around him and then into to the one he’s making. Instead we see him hop out of bed each morning, march into his studio, and make paintings. (Compare this to Lust for Life, which shows us how uniquely Van Gogh sees the world, and how he puts that world into his work.)
The paintings used as props in the movie are poor reproductions; most don’t look like paintings at all. But they give glimpses of the power of Turner’s art. In a scene set at the Royal Academy we see a young, petulant Queen Victoria belittle Sunrise with Sea Monsters to Prince Albert as “an oily yellow stain." That painting, hung high on the gallery wall, hemmed in by dutifully observed landscapes and hokey pre-Raphaelite melodramas, jumps out at us. It’s a fiery, emotional utterance, an explosion of light, a composition perched audaciously between the abstract and the figural; it’s like a scream.