STP 2014 / Sead Vegara - Art needs time
My professor used to say: “Just as we need technology to survive, we need art to help us go through our daily lives.” And Mike Leigh’s latest film MR. TURNER (2014) is indeed a remarkable piece of cinema art. MR. TURNER was in preparation even more so than Leigh’s other films were, for a very long period of time (from the 1990s), and I can easily say that is truly one of his finest features.
Once again, Leigh goes for a period piece, as in TOPSY-TURVY (1999) for example, but this time about one of Britain’s famous painters, William Turner. It is a serious challenge to depict faithfully a period in British history, in-between the Georgian and Victorian era, since the film takes place from 1825 to 1854. With great help from his regular collaborator, director of photography Dick Pope (for this film they used digital cameras for the first time and featured some extraordinary CGI shots), as well as production designer Suzie Davies, Leigh really captured and recreated the said period in history. The English countryside, cities, and towns, the White Cliffs of Dover – they have never looked so beautiful before.
No single shot in the movie is less beautiful than the paintings of William Turner. He specialized in watercolor landscapes, but what Leigh has decided to portray in his movie is William Turner’s passion for marine paintings, for which he was famous. Like all of Leigh’s films, he and his actors build characters doing lots of preparations and improvisations, reaching a unique and incredibly authentic result. At the beginning of the story we see William Turner in a beautifully crafted wide shot, standing and sketching, while the sun is rising, and at the ending he is sketching again when the sun is setting. Between those two shots Leigh puts together a collage made of bits and pieces of William Turner’s life: his relationship with his father, dealings with his fellow painters, his kind of a double life, his interest in modern technology such as trains and photography, him being ridiculed, and so on.
As the great John Huston used to say: “Half of directing is casting the right actors.” In MR. TURNER we witness the pure genius of Timothy Spall, the character actor, whose unforgettable performance truly deserved a prize for Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Helping him there are the lovely Marion Bailey as Ms. Booth, Lesley Manville as his housekeeper, just to name a few of those who have done a brilliant job. And when all this is orchestrated by a director like Mike Leigh, who knows that every single shot in the film is the most important one, the final result is one of the best movies of the year.