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[/audioplayer]Mr Turner may be the gruntiest film of the year, possibly the gruntiest film ever. ‘Grunt, grunt, grunt,’ goes Mr Turner (Timothy Spall) as he sketches, paints, gropes his housekeeper, woos a Margate landlady, winds up John Constable something rotten. But what I now know is that when you have Spall doing the grunting, and Mike Leigh at the helm, as both writer and director, such gruntiness can be quite sublime, as can snorting and huffing.
This is a biopic of the painter J.M.W. Turner, ‘master of light’, and the greatest painter that ever lived according to many, but it is not a regular biopic. It is not Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh brawling with Gauguin, going mad and cutting his ear off (Lust for Life) as the camera cuts away to hands feverishly painting sunflowers or whatever.
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