Mr. Turner

King Arter

Mr. Turner
UK/France/Germany 2014
Directed by Mike Leigh
Entertainment One Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve always been a big admirer of Mike Leigh and will always think of him as one of the more opulent of the great British directors in the history of the medium. That being said, Mr. Turner is a film that I spent quite some time avoiding.

There were two reasons for this... firstly, although I am by profession a graphic designer and had the traditional ‘arty’ schooling that such a vocation demanded back in the days when education and actual knowledge about your subject were less scorned commodities than they are today, I’ve never really been enamoured of paintings with traditional subject matter. So artists like Turner, Constable, Whistler etc were out while people like Dali, Pollock, Warhol and Rothko were in, as far as I was concerned (and my tastes really haven’t veered much since those days, to be honest). So a film about Turner was not really ever going to be my first port of call.

Secondly, one of the things I really like a lot about Leigh’s cinema is the naturalistic acting and situations which he gets from his performers. I believe that a lot of creating of the parts and rehearsal time to build the roles and improvise the dialogue and action are a big part of his films and I just couldn’t see how this seemingly rigid, ‘biographical’ straight-jacket could sit too well with this style of artistic expression (it’s one of the reasons why I’ve also been avoiding Topsy Turvy).

However, I recently found out that, although not a specific admirer of Leigh like myself, my father had a strong desire to see this one and so, after my mother bought this for him for Christmas, I was in the seemingly unenviable position of having to watch it after all and... I have to confess... I liked it as much as my father did (which, for the record, was a lot).

Now I don’t have a great deal to say about this movie, to be sure but, I didn’t want to let myself down on my ‘see a film and then write about it’ promise to myself so... here I am writing about the thing. So be gentle with me if this is not as 'up to scratch' like some of my other reviews may, or may not, be... depending on your taste.

Okay, so lets start with the easiest thing to say in that the performances here are all absolutely marvellous. Especially, of course, when you have the wonderful Timothy Spall in the title role of J.M.W Turner. This performance is especially interesting due to the fact that, for the most part, Turner could apparently be a man of few words and much of where his dialogue might have been is, instead, transformed by Spall into a series of grunts and gestures. The other thing about it is, it would seem from the performance and ‘story arc’ here (if that is the right term to use in this instance), that Turner wasn’t exactly a spectacularly nice man and his relationships with other people were sometimes not the best that they could be.

Another excellent actor in this is Dorothy Atkinson as Turner’s housekeeper (and sometime sexual partner, it would seem, among many) who really does kind of suffer as much as some of the other characters with Turner’s lack of... empathy, shall we say... with those around him. The character is kind of sidelined in the main narrative in terms of her impact on the man but ever present, hovering around the shots and the way she lets things slide and tolerates the whims and neglect of Turner is quite telling, in a way, about the mind of the painter. I believe that in real life she followed Turner into death only a couple of years later.

Now I really don’t know anything about Turner... although, I seem to remember the ‘incident’ depicted in this at the Royal Academy with the red buoy added to the painting and the quote about this act as being like Turner firing a gun shot, did come up in a lecture at college once... so the intentions of the director to deliberately inject Turnerisms visually into the movie are well beyond me to identify. However... coming from a cinematic artist who I would equate with having a fairly loose approach to his work, the shots seem to be much more rigid in their compositions and the frames have a richness of colour and light which I would, perhaps in my ignorance, term painterly. So I suspect the director has done his best to recreate some of the more famous of Turner’s works within the camera to the point that even I could tell that something was going on here. At the very least, I’m sure Leigh has enriched his compositions with the energy of the man’s paintings so, you know, if you’re a fan of Turner’s work then this picture is probably something you should see.

The film is intriguing, though, more for what isn’t said than what is and the actions (or lack of social niceties in some cases) paint an almost incomplete but appetite whetting portrait that arouses the curiosity and allows the audience to imply the arc of the character in his final years (which is the period portrayed here). Indeed, this conclusion of the sly spectacle of the ‘less is more’ approach here may well be because I have gone into the story completely ignorant of any aspect of this man’s life and, perhaps, the impressionistic strokes of Leigh’s artistic palette are meant to stimulate recognition of a story already well familiar to the majority of the audience finding their way to this work. However, as someone completely oblivious of the man’s path through life, I was certainly never bored with the characters on screen. Nor of the beautiful visual designs in which they’re captured so... you know... it’s okay to go to this one knowing nothing about the subject, too.

One scene, or series of scenes in particular, held my interest... when Turner goes to take another wife he gets a photographic portrait of himself taken for her... before bringing her back some time later for a shot of them both. His questions to the photographer and his own obvious technical expertise about lighting and so forth are highlighted, as are the hints of his expectations of the perceived future demise of his profession when photography started to capture realistic facsimiles of the everyday world. These are a nice couple of scenes and, like certain others, prod your brain into thinking about how Turner might have felt and reacted to this new fangled invention... the threat of photography.

And that’s really all I can say about Mr. Turner. As a big admirer of Mike Leigh I have to say that, although this is not on of my favourites of his works (I suspect Naked, Life Is Sweet and Happy Go Lucky may forever be my top three) it certainly is a spectacular and thought provoking film and, if you are a fan of cinema, or of Turner... and absolutely definitely if you are both... then you should probably take a look at this one as soon as possible. Another masterwork, of sorts, by one of the great British writing/directing talents of our time.

Career Girls

Leigh Huggers

Career Girls

UK/France 1997

Directed by Mike Leigh

Film 4 Region 2

The last time I watched Mike Leigh’s Career Girls was on its initial cinema run back in 1997. I remember thinking it was a fine film but, for some reason, I never caught back up with it on any home video format up until now. I wanted to rewatch this again on DVD, not because I admire Mike Leigh so much (Naked is one of the great achievements of 20th Century cinema as far as I’m concerned) but because I wanted to see another performance by the late, great Katrin Cartlidge, who died tragically in her early forties due to complications from pneumonia (if memory serves).

Looking at Career Girls now, I was surprised to find myself casting a more critical eye on the production than I had when I initially viewed it in a cinema and, startlingly, it’s not necessarily a criticism of Leigh (although I’m sure it probably should be) but a criticism of how the general performances are handled by the actors involved. Before delving into that train of thought, however, I should probably point out that, whatever you think of the performances in this one, these are all absolutely gobsmacking actors and actresses who really know how to apply their craft. That being said, I think I had a problem with a certain part of their performances but, you know, that may be just my problem and not theirs. They should know what they’re trying to achieve, after all.

The film starts off with a girl called Annie (played by Lynda Steadman) returning to London to stay with her old University friend Hannah (played by Cartlidge) and the film examines their relationship by frequently flicking back to their university days and cross cutting these with how the girls are now. There are layers of emotional heartache and poignancy in spades in this movie, which are enhanced by the juxtaposition of the two time zones layered against each other and, well, I was moved by this but also think this is possibly one of Mike Leigh’s most devastatingly depressing and bleak movies... even though the girls are able to relate and articulate their attitudes and feelings now more than they ever could in the “old days”.

The problems for me mainly lay in the way all the characters are acting when they are students. They are maybe the oddest and most eccentric bunch of students I have ever seen in my life. Beyond quirky. My student days were never like this and, believe me, I knew some odd characters. It just seems to me that all the younger characters (with the exception of one who seems to have autistic traits) are all wired to the gills all the time and have more nervous ticks and twitches than you could possibly believe... especially when you see these characters as older versions of themselves and all these little characteristics are almost all gone. This is not subtle stuff and I’m currently living in a modern cinematic landscape where every action movie characterisation is a dumbed down, hyper exaggeration of what it could be in real life merely as a short cut... but I wouldn’t expect this kind of attitude in a Mike Leigh film. Maybe I’m just missing the intent here a bit but it seems like everyone has just drunk too much coffee in the student sequences.

The other problem I have is with the plausibility of the story itself and it’s something which Leigh (and the actors if I’m not much mistaken about the way a “script” is developed on a Mike Leigh film) has had to address by commenting on it a few times in the film itself... and each time it’s addressed it feels to me less and less plausible and more like the film is trying to justify itself. Some of the wonderful and, at times, quite harrowing dramatic moments of Career Girls come when, in the space of a day, the characters accidentally bump into various people they knew from “way back” who happen to be either living in London or just “down for the day” and coincidentally happen to be walking by the same bits of London where our two main protagonists are walking on their travels. Seriously, I know it’s good for the drama to have this happening but the level of plausibility drops every time it happens. If the timescale of the modern scenes had been a month or two then maybe, just maybe, I would have bought it... but a day or two is something much different and I just can’t, personally, suspend my disbelief to the degree that Leigh requires me to do so to not question why this is happening. And it doesn’t help mend matters by having the characters freak out about the chain of coincidences as meetings happen... it just beggars belief I’m afraid.

But, having said all that, I would have to say that for me, other than those two issues, Career Girls is another in an amazing series of films that Leigh has given the world. You will be both charmed and moved by all the characters in this movie... and you’ll possibly weep at and with them, just as I was doing the other day when I watched it again. This is a very strong film and will leave you thinking yourself how people’s lives and connections to each other are a kind of alchemistic magic that we should embrace more fully, or at least take time to stop and ponder in our everyday lives. We all have people who we really click with and this film is a dark celebration of that kind of camaraderie and understanding. If you haven’t seen this one then you really ought to add it to your “to watch” list. It’s a flawed but thoroughly entertaining piece of work from one of my countries leading creative geniuses. Give it a go.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Poppy-Go-Happy

Happy-Go-Lucky UK 2008

Directed by Mike Leigh

Momentum Pictures Region 2

There’s something very unusual about Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky... in that it actually does what it says on the tin and is a genuinely upbeat and cheerful little movie. And upbeat and cheerful are two words that I mostly wouldn’t associate with the incredible artistic talent of Mike Leigh because, as brilliant and amazing as his movies usually are, they do tend to ultimately err on the side of depression and the misery of despair. But that’s usually okay because they are smart, interesting little filmic gems and they are never boring.

This particular film, however, has a main protagonist who is almost totally committed to being light and fluffy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and this character, brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins (who you will fall in love with by the end of the movie) is a poster girl for the genuinely happy faction of our society... I’ve met a few of them and they're mostly a myth because, my experience of excessively, shove-their-good-humour-down-your-throat people in general seems to be that after the first sign things are not going to go quite right, they generally crack under pressure and lie in a coma until things hopefully go away... not a good way to attempt to deal with problems.

But Sally Hawkins is, apart from a couple of little, mostly fleeting moments throughout the running time of this movie, deliriously happy from start to finish... almost unbearably so in some cases in fact. The first main scene after a credits sequence where we see her character, Poppy, riding her bike in London, is a sequence in a bookshop with a miserably unwelcoming shop keeper who is unimpressed by Poppy’s up and up, talky-friendly nature but we see that this really doesn’t bother Poppy in the slightest... and then she discovers her bike has been stolen but instead of getting overtly distressed about this and shouting or swearing or generally being affected by her plight, she just stands their unbelieving making upbeat comments about her current situation... Mike Leigh is smart, he sets this character up just right so we can take a measure of her and see exactly the kind of person she is... but then he does a very strange thing for him.

Once the character has been well established in the audiences mind with a few scenes demonstrating Poppy’s unshakeable devotion to this enviable mindset, Mike Leigh does what you would normally expect a director of his calibre to do... that is he throws Poppy into a series of encounters with people who are a damn sight less than happy and waits to see how she gets on with them. Like the diametrically opposed driving instructor Scott, played by British treasure and Leigh regular Eddie Marsan who is both intensely irritated by, but strangely drawn to, Poppy’s personality... and who shouts quite a bit at her. Or Poppy’s pregnant sister who seems to be well set up but instead tries to project her own unhappiness and insecurity onto others... like Poppy who is having none of it.

But the strange thing is that, where you would expect Mike Leigh to ensure that Poppy gets burdened by all these people and slip into a depression as you would expect her to in any other of his films, in this one Poppy stays strangely on top of things and the only time you really see her in anything like a contemplative mood about the true trouble and strife of this world comes at one, for me, key point in the movie which I shall call Poppy’s “Man with a Sack” sequence... after Federico Fellini.

To explain that last remark... Federico Fellini’s absolute masterpiece Nights of Cabiria originally featured a very key sequence which producer Dino De Laurentis thought was rubbish and slowed the movie down, so he cut it out and absconded with it for the original release and didn’t return it to Fellini until many decades later after Fellini had pleaded that he return the scene so his film students could see the film properly. This was restored to the movie and it is this version of the film which plays on modern home video cassette and DVD presentations of this key work. I can’t believe that De Laurentis cut this scene out as, for me, this is the key sequence of the movie. It’s the point in the narrative where Cabiria is able to see that her life as a prostitute is actually going to get her nowhere but old and poor and used up and it is this moment of self-aware clarity that gives the character the impetus for her course for the rest of the movie. I can’t imagine what this film must have played like at cinemas in its original release prints but the jump in Cabiria’s attitude with this sequence missing must have seemed quite an odd mis-step on Fellini’s part to audiences, who wouldn’t have known about De Laurentis’ villainous role on this occasion.

So for me, a “man with a sack” sequence is a key sequence in a film where a character becomes aware of the true nature of his or her plight and adjust their attitude as a consequence. And in Happy-Go-Lucky, this kind of scene occurs when Poppy hears a noise and goes to investigate a large, dangerous looking tramp who talks in mostly nonsensical repeat words and half-finished sentences which convey an emotion without clarification or direction of that emotion. It would be safe to say that the poor tramp, astonishingly portrayed by a guy named Stanley Townsend, is in a bad way emotionally and certainly, in terms of audience perception, represents a serious threat to Poppy... he’s a big, aggressive looking guy. This is a person, however, who causes Poppy to become more reflective about things and when the tramp, for the umpteenth time, asks in his deep, gravelly voice... “ya know?”... Poppy confirms that she does, indeed, know.

But this is the point where this Mike Leigh film continues to go in a diametrically opposite way to a regular Mike Leigh film as Poppy contemplates this, remains ultimately unaffected and carries on being her Happy-Go-Lucky self. She processes the emotions and reconstitutes them as her usual currency of happy, positive vibes and the strength of the character is that she can rise above the pitfalls and traps of life and confidently dismiss them in the spirit of “oh well” and continue her attempt to bring mirth and jollity to the world.

She’s a very strong character and a lovable one, it has to be said, but on my second watch of this movie (I first caught it in cinemas back on its original release), I found that I wasn’t quite responding to her in quite the same way. She began to wind me up a little and it’s obvious she was winding up some of the other, more downbeat characters in the film and I realised we’d seen this kind of character before from Mike Leigh... just not in such a happy incarnation. My favourite movie by this director is the excellent Naked, starring the unbelievably talented David Thewlis as the irrepressible Johnny. Now you can’t exactly say that this guy is the happiest person in the world but he is a person who tends to prod and probe at people and things with an enthusiasm which winds people up and gets him into trouble... in fact, towards the end of the movie the character takes a lot of punishment due to the fact that he just can’t leave things alone. He wants to know how things tick... he’s like Holden Caulfield on acid and I realised when I was watching Happy-Go-Lucky that Poppy is just a lighter, happier, non-threatening variation of this initial Johnny character. She teases and pushes and explores people because she just can’t help herself... there is no choice. So in some ways, Poppy is not entirely a departure for Mike Leigh... just a departure in a single sustained tone.

Like all Mike Leigh films, Happy-Go-Lucky is a little bit of a masterpiece and deserves your attention... it is also filled with quite addictive characters which will ultimately encourage repeat viewings on DVD... at least in my household. One thing’s for sure though... if you watch this one it might take you a while to get the phrase “en-ra-ha” out of your head. Take a peek and see if I'm not right!

Another Leigh

Another Year 2009 UK

Directed by Mike Leigh

This film recently screened at UK cinemas

There are three things I can always rely on when I go to see a Mike Leigh movie...

1. It’s going to be really, incredibly depressing... but hey, I don’t mind that. And his last film, Happy-Go-Lucky kinda caught me out on that in that the main character was such a positive live-wire... an unusual departure for Leigh I feel. Although it has to be said that there were also moments of great pain and depression and hurting, damaged souls walking around on the lead character’s peripherals... so not too much of a departure then.

2. I will be in the hands of an assured, confident film-maker who has never once let me down and who will ensure that, even if the subject matter of the movie is not to my taste, the movie will never flag or be boring or be anything other than riveting.

3. It will always feature some of the greatest acting performances ever committed to celluloid.

And that last bit’s very important when it comes to Mike Leigh because, in my humble opinion, Mike Leigh is one of the all-time great actor’s directors.

Seriously, if you’ve never seen a Mike Leigh film and you regard yourself as someone who is interested in the art of performance then you should seriously check this guy's films out because the ensemble casts of these movies kick serious acting arse and any performance in any of his films would put most acting Oscar winners to shame.

And Another Year is certainly no exception to this rule, populated by a cast of characters that will make you laugh, cry or cringe in their on-screen personae.

I think a lot of the credibility of his characters stems from the fact that, according to a live post-movie interview I saw after the movie Womb with two of the actors who also happened to star in Another Year (Peter Wight and Lesley Manville), Leigh doesn’t start off with a script and goes into a movie, instead, with an intensive period of rehearsal with the actors to shape and grow the characters and the situations which shape the course of the movie. This is quite evident in his movies and it’s very much like that expression they use for big budget movies which have a lot of scenery and special effects... you know when people say they can see the “money” all up there on the screen? Well in Mike Leigh’s case it’s definitely a case of... you can see the prep time with the actors all up there on the screen!

This was a gripping but hard movie to watch because one of the main protagonists, a needy and downwardly spiralling character played by Lesley Manville, reminded me so much of someone I used to know. And there was another character in there who is even more tragic in some ways than this pitiful wreck of a woman and I thought... wow, that could almost be me in ten years time! So not an easy film for me to watch in those terms.

Don't get me wrong though, Another Year is a great, great movie and it does the usual Mike Leigh thing of not really having a start and end point... and just meandering along at its own pace without coming to any kind of conclusion... other than the conclusions you might yourself make about the lives of the characters on screen. I’d single out some actors or actresses but, as is always the case with Leigh’s movies... everyone in it was absolutely brilliant.

Now, I’ve always found this director's movies a bit hit and miss but not in the obvious way... as I’ve more or less said earlier... they’re pretty much all brilliant. I do however, have an acid test for movies which I like to apply to everything I see and it is this... would I want to watch it again. With Leigh’s films it is in this aspect that I find him hit and miss. Certainly with Naked - in my opinion his greatest film, if not one of the all-time greatest movies ever made - then I can watch it repeatedly and often. The same goes for movies of his like Life Is Sweet, Happy Go Lucky and High Hopes (starring the lovely Ruth Sheen who acts her socks off again in Another Year playing a somewhat similar kind of character, I think). Others of his movies, Vera Drake or perhaps All or Nothing, I could only ever watch once. I don’t need to see those again as I won’t get a buzz out of repeat watchings for those particular films.

Another Year sits in the second category for me... I couldn’t watch it again... too painful. But if it sits in that second category then it certainly sits there proudly. Because, repeat viewings or not, this movie joins this director's other works as being one of the finest films made for the cinema. If you’ve never seen one of Leigh’s movies before, you should definitely check it out. And if you have seen his movies before... c’mon, you already know the score with this film-maker. It’s a must-see. So track it down soonest.