MR. TURNER

Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are two national treasures of British cinema. They’ll both hate me for saying so but it’s true and Leigh simply underlines the fact with Mr. Turner. If this is not his masterpiece I can’t wait to see what is.

It’s a truly beautiful film that consists not so much of a narrative as of dramatic or comic episodes, tableaux vivants each ingeniously lit by cinematographer Dick Pope to look stunningly like paintings by, well, JMW Turner, who else?

At the centre of it in the title role is a gruff, often grumpy and scowling Timothy Spall giving the performance of a lifetime. When last I met him (at a reception given by the Queen at Windsor Castle. I thought you’d like to know that) he had recently recovered from life-threatening leukaemia and said he’d bought himself a Bentley ‘as a reward for not dying’.

After this movie he deserves a lot more than a Bentley. The action covers the last quarter of a century of Turner’s life and switches mainly between his London home and a boarding house in Margate where he goes to paint seascapes. In between times this barber’s son, who lived from 1775 to 1851, mingles freely and intimately with the nobility who buy his paintings and the members of the Royal Academy, which exhibits them.

At various times he is importuned for a loan by impecunious and belligerent fellow artist Benjamin Haydon (Martin Savage) and listens politely but unimpressed to the pretentious views of lisping young art critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire).

He’s a man of few words, our Turner, who yet manages to communicate clearly with a series of grunts, growls and other guttural sounds. A nice man to know? Ah, maybe not. His adoring father (Paul Jesson) humbly fetches and carries for him.

So, too, does his equally adoring housekeeper (Dorothy Atkinson), with whom he has brisk, casual sex up against a bookcase. At one point we meet his neglected, not to say discarded, wife, daughters and granddaughter to whom he offers neither support nor affection.

Yet he does feel affection, especially for his father and his widowed Margate landlady (Marion Bailey), who at first has no idea who he is but is happy to take him to her bed and to live with him.

All this is sumptuous to look at and listen to and meticulously handled by Leigh. If you wished to carp you could say it’s a little too long but only because Leigh has the courage to take his time and linger on specific moments, looks or exchanges.

The whole cast is excellent and Spall is magnificent. He and Pope have already won major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the movie generally is a shoo-in for the Baftas. Indeed, if there’s any justice, Leigh, Spall and Pope at least should feature in the Oscar nominations, although as I’ve said before, Oscar and justice don’t always have much to do with each other.