Counting Down The Fourteen Best Films Of 2014
In this totally subjective game of lists, there can only be one winner.
#4: Mr Turner, dir. Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh’s immersive biopic of English landscape painter JMW Turner (Timothy Spall) is currently in preview, just in time for lists like this!
Most creative biopics simply gloss their subject’s life as pretty period pieces. Leigh’s vision is vividly grubby, picaresque and often hilarious, its naturalism making the early 19th century seem both strange and familiar. Leigh also beautifully conveys the qualities of light Turner famously sought to capture; many shots cleverly recreate actual Turner artworks.
Grumpy and grunting, Spall captures Turner’s contradictions: both a Cockney outsider and Academy insider; kind, yet callous; misanthropic, yet convivial; fat and unkempt, yet sexually and romantically entangled with several women. The film makes jokes at Turner’s expense, yet also delights as he gets one up on others, including absurdly foppish critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) and deadly rival landscape painter John Constable (James Fleet). Mr. Turner is excellent – easily the year’s best biopic.