Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year – and the most beautiful too

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[/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what I now know is that when you have Spall doing the grunting, and Mike Leigh at the helm, as both writer and director, such gruntiness can be quite sublime, as can snorting and huffing.

This is a biopic of the painter J.M.W. Turner, ‘master of light’, and the greatest painter that ever lived according to many, but it is not a regular biopic. It is not Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh brawling with Gauguin, going mad and cutting his ear off (Lust for Life) as the camera cuts away to hands feverishly painting sunflowers or whatever. (Hmm. I wonder if that painting will be well-known one day?) It covers the last 25 years of Turner’s life, and there is no narrative arc as such. At first, you will be thinking: when is ‘The Story’ going to start? But ‘The Story’ never starts. It is episodic, a series of vignettes, and once you surrender to the rhythm, and the grunting, and fully immerse yourself in it, you will find yourself fully immersed in Turner’s world.

By the time the film opens, in the 1820s, Turner is already wealthy and famous, living in a grand house on Harley Street with his doting father (Paul Jesson), a former barber, and a lovelorn housekeeper (the terrific Dorothy Atkinson) whom Turner uses to satisfy his sexual urges. He gropes her. He has a quickie against the bookcase, from behind.