Mr. Turner is an exquisitely made movie, and on an aesthetic level, it’s a work that consistently leaves one in awe over it’s spellbinding use of color, light, and texture. But I have to be honest – I found this movie to be dry-dry-dry, and while that’s not a terrible thing per se (it’s hardly uninteresting), had it not been for the overwhelming cinematography, I might have not been as engaged to the mildly repetitious narrative. Timothy Spall is indeed fantastic in this film, all primal sweaty and completely ensconced in his role, but the absurd amount of grunting and strange-noise emitting became distracting if not hilarious by the mid point of this two hour and 30 minute film. And make no mistake about it — subtitles were REQUIRED while watching this film on Blu-ray. I’ve watched a lot of British/Irish films before with thick accents — but some of the lines, as spoken by numerous members of the cast (Spall included), were utterly incomprehensible to my ear. So that was sort of an annoyance, because the last thing I want to be doing while watching a film as absurdly gorgeous as this one, is to be reading text dialogue at the bottom of the screen. Leigh is a master filmmaker, there’s clearly no question about that, and this film is miles from something like Happy-Go-Lucky or half-dozen other entries from his diverse and spectacular resume, further reinforcing the notion that he’s a filmmaker capable of telling almost any type of story. But for me, this was the Dick Pope show all the way, as he conjured up one obscenely photographed sequence after another, demonstrating a tactile understanding of how to merge Turner’s lush and evocative paintings into a fully alive piece of cinema, allowing the brushstrokes from Turner’s canvass to spill out into the frame, thus turning the entire film into a living, breathing cinematic painting.
Podcasting Them Softly 