A discouraging start as we get to the cinema to find that the main ticket office to the right is shut and we were relegated to the side of the ice cream operation to the left. Perhaps it was senior time, but in any event we had to wait for any ticket action until a complicated ice cream had been assembled. We passed the time waiting eyeing up all the huge buckets and bags, sacks even, containing pop-corn, no doubt mostly coated in a great deal of sugar and which served to remind me of the way in which the Odeon people have messed up the arm rests of their seats by incorporating holders for the buckets, if not the bags. And then, when we come to be served it was more or less impossible to see what seats you are buying from the customer side of the machine, although after some fiddling about, we manage to get the back row premium seats we want, the front row ones not being so premium at all. Stumble our way - the layout being confusing in the dark and the stairs being steep - to our seats, which turn out to be capacious but not particularly comfortable. But we settle down to watch the few remaining trailers, very loud, as usual.
And so to the film, the opening of which includes some arty shots of a flat landscape and a very nifty graphic based, I think, on the picture illustrated above. The film goes on to include quite a lot of arty shots of landscape and of water, but oddly not much sea that I remember. The score is unobtrusive, and often entirely absent. So far so good.
We are dumped into more or less the middle of Turner's life, in a film which jumps around a great deal, with a lot of takes being broken off rather abruptly and which is not contrived so as to fill in much background about the missing first half of his life.
Slightly confused by Turner's father being portrayed by someone who appears to be younger than than the actor doing Mr. Turner (Mr. Spall). Turning to the women, the film did not include much in the way of young & improbably pretty women. The younger female lead was disfigured and the older female lead was older. Realism, rather than eye candy for the gents., was the order of the day.
It is always hard to made convincing films about the past and while this film tries hard, a lot of the town and interior scenes seemed very contrived to me. One almost felt the stage management people creeping around props warehouses looking out suitable bits and bobs with which to dress their sets. Nor was I very convinced about the arty bits, we being shown a Turner who spent a lot of time at his art, but who appeared to be impossibly slap-dash about it. We had, for example, his sketch pad flapping about while he sketched, which I thought most improbable.
The film is much too long at around two and a half hours and the first hour and a half drag a bit. But it comes to a fine end with Turner's aging and dying; to the extent that the film is more about that than about him as an artist or his art. Well suited to the more or less exclusively senior audience.
Home to read the short biography offered by Canaday, one of his longer, Canaday rating Turner as England's only artistic genius. Of humble oriigin, very successful during his life, dying old and rich, went out of fashion and was only canonised (as Canaday puts it) after he was made the subject of a show in New York in 1966. The start of a wave of fashion which has yet to break. But I should not knock as I do like his paintings, even if there are too many of them, and I do go and see them from time to time. See, for example, reference 3.
Canaday also observes that the only person to truly appreciate Turner during his life was Ruskin, shown in the film as a bit of a prat. Otherwise, I find that the film has been fair with Turner. The stuff portrayed did mostly happen, or at least was in the spirit of the chap and his way of life. But I think that we would have got on better with the film had we read this potted biography first, which should not have been necessary. I also think that we would get on better at a second viewing, perhaps in the comfort of our own home with a DVD from a Hook Road car booter.
Image courtesy of the Tate gallery.
PS: don't understand why click to enlarge the illustration works in the unusual way it does. Does the file include some anti-theft device? Tried converting from the png produced by snip to a jpg produced by paint but that does not seem to have made any difference.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=canaday.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.
Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=intimate+connections.
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