'Mr. Turner' an unromantic look at a Romantic painter

THE LATEST British genius to turn up at the movies is painter J.M.W. Turner, and next to Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking, he's the hardest to understand.

I don't mean as an artist - in "Mr. Turner," he's a variation on the familiar theme of self-absorbed creative type trailed by the usual retinue of neglected children and lovers.

I mean that he's hard to understand as a speaker. Not since "Sling Blade" has an actor (Timothy Spall) delivered a performance comprised of so many guttural sounds.

In fact, the sounds he makes while carving another slice of pig cheek would make Karl Childers, of "Sling Blade," feel right at home. As would the pig cheek.

Spall's snorts are part of the character's warts-and-all design - Turner may have been a romantic, but Lord Byron he was not. He was a short, stocky, gruff man of humble origins - the self-taught son of a barber who inherited his father's industriousness and devotion to craft.

In "Mr. Turner," we see that he also inherits his father's middle-class commercial drive - Turner's favorite paintings are the ones that sell. He haggles over the price of dyes and oils, and is absorbed in the technical aspect of light and image, studying prisms and cameras.

The painter's lunch-pail approach confounds admiring critics, who pompously find grand themes in works that Turner creates via a busy compulsion that he himself would be at a loss to explain.

Director Mike Leigh, though, has some ideas. The movie reminds us, from time to time, of the cruelty of life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Turner lost his mother to insanity; a sister died at age 4. He loses a daughter in the course of the film, and we are astonished when one of Turner's colleagues (Martin Savage) casually mentions that he's lost six children to disease.

Turner's lover (Marion Bailey) has lost a husband to the sea, and buried another who was haunted in life by the horrors of having worked on a slave ship.

From time to time in the film, we see Turner suddenly overcome with snorting grief, as if the emotional magnitude of these things has unexpectedly welled up within him.

This provides a window to Turner's work, so often concerned with storm-tossed vessels, sailors faced with a remorseless natural world that's indifferent to them. In the film, as in life, Turner had himself lashed Ulysses-like to the mast of a ship, to ride out a storm and commit its fury to memory.

At the end of his own life, in the throes of congestive heart failure, Turner drags himself from bed to sketch the body of a drowned girl washed up on a beach.

That he would not exert himself in the least to comfort his living children or many of his mistresses (save for his last) is part of Leigh's portrait, which is unsparing and rather lengthy.

Leigh's method is to grant actors great latitude to invent their own characters. I wonder if his deference to their contributions might interfere with judicious editing.