Mr Turner (film)

Synopsis

A look at the last quarter century of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner. Profoundly affected by the death of his esteemed father, loved by his housekeeper, Hannah Danby, whom he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close and loving relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

Throughout all this, Turner travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits a brothel, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

Release

Mr. Turner had its premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme dOr, with Timothy Spall winning the Best Actor award and cinematographer Dick Pope winning the Vulcan Award. Entertainment One released the film in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2014. Sony Pictures Classics handled the United States distribution, with a release date of 19 December 2014. It was screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Piracy

The film was leaked by the hacker group "Guardians of Peace" onto peer-to-peer file sharing websites on November 27, more than three weeks ahead of its intended theatrical release, as part of the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack. Along with it came Fury and three other at-the-time unreleased Sony Pictures films (Annie, Still Alice and To Write Love on Her Arms). Within three days of the initial leak, Mr. Turner had been downloaded by an estimated 63,379 unique IPs.

Critical reception

Mr. Turner has received universal praise from critics. The performance of Timothy Spall was lauded, along with Gary Yershons film score and Dick Popes cinematography. It has a "certified fresh" score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes based on critic reviews, but a score of only 60% based on audience reviews. The "Critics Consensus" states, "Led by a masterful performance from Timothy Spall and brilliantly directed by Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner is a superior Hollywood biopic." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 94 out of 100 based on 41 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Critic Katie Kilkenny in The Atlantic called it "a gorgeous, important film". Observer critic Mark Kermode described the film as a "portrait of a man wrestling light with his hands as if it were a physical element: tangible, malleable, corporeal". Slate reviewer Dana Stevens wrote, "Writing about Mr. Turner a few weeks after seeing it, I feel a craving to be again immersed in its world, which is rich with colors, textures, and, it sometimes almost seems, smells…"

The consonance between the film and its subject was addressed by Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries in England: “Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall’s great achievement is showing us how the artist approached the physical business of painting. But they also convey the spirit of a man whose reputation as a curmudgeon is unwarranted, given his passionate interest in people and the world around him. There is a great humanitarian streak in Turner and Mike Leigh has found a way of capturing this on film, as he has done so often before.�

Production

Mr Turner filmed in several locations around the UK. Although Margate wasnt actually used to represent Turners Margate, the production visited Kent to shoot a couple of scenes. HMS Gannet in The Historic Dockyard Chatham was used in the scene where Turner has himself strapped to the mast of a sailing ship during a storm. Stangate Creek doubled as the Thames when Turner and his friends are rowed along Thames and discuss the HMS Victory, they then toast the HMS Temeraire.