I approached this with trepidation after the mess Timothy Spall made of Pierrepoint. Playing the obviously cheerful chap, who as well as being a hangman ran a public house, as a curmudgeon who mumbled a lot. But as I got to see it free on DVD, and hadn't paid to see it I gave it a chance. It was worse than I could have believed. Spall was not only playing Turner as a mumbling curmudgeon, but this time he was inexplicably grunting and snorting for much of the movie. He seemed to be channelling his previous role as the Rat Man from the Harry Potter films. All this was without the extemporised dialogue that Mike Leigh insists his cast use. Some of the dialogue seemed irrelevant and inconsequential. Adding nothing to what already seemed a series of set pieces strung together. Ruth Sheen, who is usually sublime, seemed utterly wasted by this process and seemed in a hurry to disclaim her lines and get back to something more interesting. After this scene I began to watch each of the regular Leigh guest stars as they appeared for their one weeks work. Whole scenes seemed irrelevant. Especially when we had only a couple of hours to give life to a historical figure, why then did we waste whole scenes on made up irrelevancies ? The sex scenes. Surely the one with the downtrodden housemaid has to win a Razzie award for the least erotic ever in film history. And the depiction of the Ruskins, differed so much from the way they were presented in the recent Effie Gray, that I found their numerous scenes of waffling dialogue too much to bare. They were two- dimensional bores, totally unlike their brilliant depiction in the other movie. I actually turned it off screaming during one of their discussions of a painting that wasn't even present in the room. I found a much better film on Channel 4 that kept me engrossed for another hour. So alas I will never know if Mr Turnip, as I was calling him by now, ever painted his masterpiece. I learnt nothing about him that I didn't already know, except that his father was mad and liked to shave pigs heads.
Review of Mr. Turner
