Where is the art in Mr Turner? 

I find it impossible to resist movies about the life of an artist, even though experience has taught me that they disappoint more than they amaze. Artists are often portrayed as a caricature or cliché based on a director's fantasy of what an artist's life might be like. Mike Leigh's film "Mr. Turner" is no exception. Having recently spent time in the Tate Britain with J.M.W. Turner's work, I decided to take my chances on this movie and hope for the best.

The first hour was excruciatingly slow; however, I do imagine people who love period dramas would very much appreciate the attention to details, in terms of the sets and clothing. Perhaps I perceived the beginning to be actually slower than it was, because I was eagerly awaiting for some mention of painting, or even a character engaged in the act of actually painting. Eventually there were a few very short scenes of Turner using immaculately clean paint brushes to make rapid, mindless strokes across the canvas or frantic back-and-forth movements with a pencil if he was sketching. In reality, most of Turner's work was painted with an intense attention to detail that would be impossible to achieve in the comic-like way painting was portrayed in the movie. I think the director thought these fast gestures would somehow capture the sense of movement in the work, but instead they gave a very skewed version of Turner's very elaborate and layered painting process.

I understand that the general public is more interested in the artist as a personality, rather than the artist's method of making work. However, I object to Turner being rendered as a barely articulate person who communicates in grunts instead of words. He was an amazing painter with a revolutionary approach that the movie hardly touches on. Instead of painting the image of the sea from the shore, he tethered himself to the hull of a ship to experience what it is like being in a storm at sea. Turner transformed the passive act of painting the sea from a distance, to actively being one with the sea. His tumultuous painted waves are a record of his bodily memory. Turner's methodology for making paintings of storms at sea could be seen as precursor to the phenomenological approach of 20th century artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, where physical experience is the central focus of the art. 

Mike Leigh is a renowned director who has made some very poignant and dramatic films, such as Secrets and Lies. Based on the director's other movies that focus on England's underclass, I would guess that Leigh's motive here was to make Turner into a regular working-class bloke (hence the title "Mr. Turner"). Unfortunately, the regularization of "Mr. Turner" turned him into somewhat of a clown who just happened to make art with a few casual flicks of a brush.

Despite my passionate dislike for the movie, most viewers and reviewers found it quite fantastic (there were cries of disdain when it did not win an Academy Award). I had to search high and low to find even one slightly critical review of the film, so my opinion joins a very small, non-vocal minority. Here is the review from the SF Gate, the sole dissenting voice, which was lambasted in its comments section. People loved this movie. For a favourable review, go to any major newspaper: The Guardian, The Globe & Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and on it goes. Rarely will you ever read so many superlatives about one film: "brilliant", "a masterpiece", "bewitching". What do artists think of this film? Am I the only one unable to enjoy seeing Turner as a simple-minded, drunken lout randomly slapping paint onto canvases while groping a passing maid? 

What we often learn from films about artists, is how people who are not artists imagine what it must be like to be artist. In the movie Pollock, Ed Harris (who played Pollock) spent ten years learning to paint like the artist. The result being that he was utterly convincing in the role, and the film is one that focuses on the art almost as much as the person. Another excellent film about an artist, and also directed by an artist (Julian Schnabel), is the now classic Basquiat. Its good to know that it is possible for a movie about an artist to give the art as much attention as to the personality. This was definitely not the case for Mr. Turner.