Gruff artist Turner movie an absorbing watch

I’m fascinated with movies about artists. They have interesting and incredible lives and make some exquisite pieces of art. Even if you don’t care for the plots, at least you have the benefit of getting to view some world-class masterpieces without having to travel to world-class museums to see them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo and Jackson Pollock are just a few of the great painters whose lives and oeuvres have been translated onto the screen to such excellent effect. Even the biopic of that first one was a colossal bore but the visuals were interesting.

And now it’s time for Joseph Mallord William Turner (known briefly as J. M. W. Turner) to have his turn, and it’s lined up to kick off the new season of Reel Mondays now at the Arden Theatre.

While his name might not be as immediately recognizable as Picasso, that doesn’t mean that Turner didn’t make a meaningful contribution to the annals of art history. Mr. Turner – the movie – isn’t necessarily going to win prizes for having a fast-paced plot or easily discernible dialogue. What it does have is compelling insight into an historic character with its slice of life approach to his story.

The British painter was known for his watercolour landscapes. They were dramatic, perhaps overly so, but hey, those were the times of high Romanticism. He loved images of the sea and storms in full turmoil but with an unmistakable light that perfused the darkness. It was this characteristic that earned him the nickname “the painter of light.” Perhaps his personal life was about finding the light through the darkness as well.

Portrayed by Timothy Spall as gruff and grumbly, mumbly even, Turner lived with his housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson) and his father William Turner Sr. (Paul Jesson). We see glimpses of the painter throughout the last two decades of his life after he had already firmly established himself and his name as a force on the art scene.

He was known as an eccentric, famously having himself tied to the mast of a ship so that he could appropriately capture the visual of a raging sea storm from right inside it. Of course, he got deathly ill from it but the experience served his work well.

His eccentricities extended beyond the canvas and there are some strange relationships depicted to shore up that description. These compel the viewer to speculate on what the man was really like and what really happened in his life. He had lovers, none of whom he married but they did bear his children. Some such relationships were perhaps more than they seemed, leaving a few questions lingering and not answered sufficiently.

For some, the movie might be a bit of an endurance test because of the runtime and the meandering nature of the story. I was rapt with attention at the language, the scenery, the cinematography, the characters, and especially Spall’s characterization. He might not have had the most likeable of personalities in his life, but I fell in love with Mr. Turner and wished there was still more time left with him.