There are no surprises in biopics. We know what’s going to unfold. Yet we love watching actors go to great lengths to be the spitting image of someone famous. Why? Partly because, I suspect, we like the comfort of a tale foretold. Partly because of the immense shadenfreude we feel at knowing that the life of a genius too, is fraught and unhappy. When we watch a biopic, we become voyeurs and the film, a peephole that seduces us into thinking that we ‘know’ the subject at the centre of it. But most of all, the reason why we love watching biopics is because they are inspirational. Not just in the obvious way. Sure, ‘Bhaag Milkha Bhaag’ is an inspiring story, but what is even more inspirational is the (laughable, imho) bodily transformation of Farhan Akhtar. I bet BMB sent more people running to gym than to a deeper appreciation of Mr Singh. Similarly in better-made films like ‘Ray’ or ‘Walk the Line’, we are more inspired by the fact that Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix could transform into Ray Charles and Johnny Cash so convincingly that for the 2 hours of the film, we are willingly fooled. And the more fooled we are, the better we think it is. I love me some good biopics (most recently, ‘The Theory of Everything’) but it’s definitely a genre that’s stuck in a rut.
So it’s a good thing that Mike Leigh comes in with Mr Turner, a biopic on the famous 18th Century British painter J.M.W Turner whose ‘fuzzy’ paintings of nature helped lift the very concept of landscape painting into prominence when it was languishing and playing second fiddle to the more lucrative arena of portrait painting. Three decades after he died, his use of light would inspire the formation of the Impressionist movement. Played magnificently by Timothy Spall, Mr Turner is an intelligent ogre who can’t suffer fools and whose preferred mode of communication is a series of versatile grunts. Looking a bit like a gargoyle (his words, not mine), Spall plays Turner superbly as a man who had no patience for the fripperies of his time but whose sharp edges and general grumpiness hid a capacity for great emotion. I know next to nothing of art, and even I could sense why his landscapes are considered brilliant. They capture the enormity of nature and the insignificance of man which at that period would have been a very unfashionable thought to have.
The reason I can come to that conclusion about Turner’s work despite being a philistine is because Mike Leigh approaches Mr. Turner as an instrument to deepen our understanding of the art and not the man. Although these are connected, they are not the same. After watching Mr Turner, I didn’t want to read about J.M.W, I just wanted to stare at a painting by him.
Lady Middlebrow 