In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s film about the life and work of J.M.W. Turner. Here’s an excerpt.
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Life usually tells the best stories—but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. That’s why so many novelists, filmmakers and playwrights are drawn to fictionalized biography, which at its best can plumb the complexities of a life in ways that aren’t available to even the most accomplished of conventional biographers. Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” tells us more about Huey Long’s fractured character than any existing biography of Louisiana’s most celebrated politician, just as Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” shines a brighter light on the passions and peculiarities of William Randolph Hearst than a well-chosen five-foot shelf of non-fiction books about the man and his times.
Nevertheless, “All the King’s Men” and “Citizen Kane” are works of fiction freely based on fact (even the names were changed) that make no claims to historical accuracy. Explicitly biographical art, by contrast, can be a considerably trickier proposition. Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” and “Frost/Nixon” are fictionalized stage versions of actual occurrences in the lives of well-known men and women—and both of these exceedingly well-manicured plays remind us that dramatization too often amounts to trivialization.
This is never more true than when it comes to films that purport to tell the story of a creative artist’s life. (Two words: Cole Porter.) But if you want to see a biopic about an artist that gets everything right—and one that is also a major work of art in its own right—then make haste to seek out “Mr. Turner,” Mike Leigh’s film about the man widely and rightly thought to be England’s greatest painter….
Except for “Topsy-Turvy,” Mr. Leigh’s identically penetrating 1999 study of how Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Mikado,” “Mr. Turner” is truer to the realities of the artist’s life than any other movie ever made. But what really sets it apart from such previous art-themed films as “Lust for Life,” Vincente Minnelli’s excellent 1956 study of Vincent Van Gogh, is that “Mr. Turner” isn’t just about Turner. It’s also about the long-lost world in which he lived, England in the first half of the 19th century, and part of what makes it a great film is the thickly layered complexity with which it illustrates that world.
The special genius of film is that it is a realistic, quasi-documentary pictorial medium. Hence it lends itself to the construction of cinematic “time machines” like “Mr. Turner” and “Topsy-Turvy,” in which layer upon layer of painstakingly realized visual details create an uncanny impression of historical reality. No stage production can summon up that kind of you-are-there illusion…
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Read the whole thing here.
The theatrical trailer for Mr. Turner: