Sumptuous treat with director and star at top of their game
I’M GLAD Mr Turner is being released here and into the North American market late in the year. That’s a sure sign the film’s backers believe it should be up for at least a couple of Academy Awards. They’re right.
Mr Turner is Mike Leigh’s long-gestating biopic of the British painter JMW Turner.
The film covers roughly the last 20 years of Turner’s life, finding him at the height of his artistic powers, feted wherever he goes, at the centre of an eventful and apparently quite scandalous love life, and about to be brought low by the death of his beloved dad, whom Turner regarded as being his best and closest friend.
According to Leigh, Turner was a tumultuous, eccentric character, who did not suffer fools gladly and who found little use for sentiment or even much compassion in his personal life.
But he was a passionate, driven and uncompromising artist, who found all the emotional stimulus he craved in the skies, storms,
Turner.
Timothy Spall is simply superb as the British painter J M W fires and wrecked ships he captured on his canvases.
As Turner, Timothy Spall is beyond praise. This is just about the single best performance from any leading man I have ever seen. Turner provides Leigh and Spall with a banquet of human traits to feast on and regurgitate and the film-makers happily make pigs of themselves.
Spall’s Turner is larger than life, without ever toppling into caricature. He is nuanced, astonishingly expressive, even at his most mute and mesmerising from first scene to last.
At the centre of nearly every shot, Spall hefts this film on to his shoulders and carries it home like a hero.
Around Spall, the support cast all do great work, with Dorothy Atkinson particularly excellent as Turner’s put-upon housekeeper and Marion Bailey as his landlady and lover.
But Spall’s real co-star here is the cinematography from Leigh’s regular collaborator Dick Pope. Pope and Leigh have been working together for 25 years now and Pope has shot most of Leigh’s best work from Life is Sweet (1990) onwards.
In the next few months, I think you’ll see plenty of Leigh and Spall and their producers, collecting various gongs and baubles at awards ceremonies. I hope there’s also some acclaim for Pope.
With Leigh and Spall each working at the top of their games, Mr Turner was always going to be an excellent and engaging film. That it is also one of the most beautiful I have seen in years, is the work of Pope.
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
RUSSELL CROWE plays Connor, an Australian farmer who has lost three sons in the hell of the battle at Gallipoli.
We get into The Water Diviner – which is also Crowe’s directing debut – via a wonderfully wellcrafted and promising opening scene, and then a pretty decent second act, as Connor travels to Turkey to try and recover his boys’ remains.
Crowe is happy here to indulge in a bit of gentle revisionism and present the Turkish soldiers he encounters as noble types who fought and killed the Anzacs only to defend their own lands and freedom.
Up to this point, and even later, as Connor finds himself fighting alongside his new allies in a skirmish early in the GrecoTurkish war, The Water Diviner feels and looks like a very superior slice of Australian drama, well shot, well-acted and occasionally very well written.
It all comes crashing down as Crowe indulges some misguided guess at what his own appeal is and tries to also include a quite saccharine romance with a beautiful Turkish hotelier (played by the Ukrainian model and exBond girl Olga Kurylenko).
Connor’s earlier protestations of sympathy for the loss of Turkish lives are hilariously at odds with his ill-concealed excitement at finding out Kurylenko’s character was widowed by the war. The faltering relationship that ensues, with Crowe all doe eyes for the young and vulnerable woman, makes for pretty queasy viewing, quite undermining everything else the film has achieved.
The Water Diviner is a film of much promise. I know many people will admire it a great deal as a riposte to some of the myths of the Anzac’s Turkish campaign.
But by being allowed to devolve into the frankly tedious tale of whether or not some pot-bellied ocker is going to get his leg over or not, Crowe’s film eventually simply collapses under the weight of its star and director’s own ego.
JOHN LITHGOW and Alfred Molina are Ben and George. They have been together for 39 years and now they are married. They head off on an inadvisedly expensive honeymoon and come home to New York to find that George is being fired from his job.
Broker than they had planned for, Ben and George are forced to sell their spacious apartment and then to be apart for a month or two as they hunt for a new place to live.
George stays with younger friends, while Ben goes to live with his nephew, his wife and their son.
What follows just about constitutes the perfect small-scale romantic drama, with a side order of good comedy and a sweetly skewed resolution, the subtleties of which I’m still smiling at.
With very strong performances across the board – from the two leads to Marisa Tomei and a well chosen bunch of support players – and a smart, literate and bittersweet script, Love Is Strange is wee gem of a film.
It ends all too soon and on a note that finally gave in to a little sentimentality, but the journey there is terrific.
Very recommended.