Canvases on celluloid

Amidst the Oscar hoopla of the past few weeks, and the accompanying burden of expectations on a critic - that most of one's time should be spent analysing the relative merits of award favourites Birdman, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel - one of my most relaxed, responsibility-free viewing experiences was Mike Leigh's Mr Turner. Which may seem a strange thing to say, since this film, about the final two decades in the life of Romanticist painter JMW Turner, is not in itself a light or easy watch. Two-and-a-half hours long, made by a famously idiosyncratic director, it isn't the sort of biopic that neatly partitions the many complexities of a life into a bento box-like arrangement and supplies heartwarming epiphanies along the way. (For an example of that, see the over-praised The Theory of Everything, about Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane.)

In fact, woe betide anyone who wanders into the hall with no idea what Mr Turner is about, since the film begins in media res with hardly any contextual information, and the accents are hard to decipher at first. The painter, marvelously played by Timothy Spall, seems to grunt and snort more than he talks (an early scene wittily contrasts his appearance with that of a dead pig being prepared for roast) and little "happens" over the course of the story. We see Turner bantering with his beloved daddy and mostly ignoring his estranged wife and children; he moves to a seaside apartment and becomes involved with a landlady, while simultaneously maintaining a sexual relationship of convenience with a woman back home; he paints, doesn't get the respect he deserves, and dies, seemingly far from peace with the world or with his own achievement. Yet throughout this collection of vignettes is a purity of purpose, a resolve to capture the many shades of the man and his world. And there is Dick Pope's beautiful photography, which does a fine job of making this film's "canvas" resemble the colours, the texture and the majesty of Turner's own famous landscapes.

A friend joked once that films about painters can be a bit like watching paint dry for a few hours. The standard bearer for this idea is Jacques Rivette's often riveting but also hugely self-indulgent four-hour epic, La Belle Noiseuse, about an old artist and his young muse. For every accessible, plot-driven movie such as the Hollywood classic Lust for Life (with Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh) or the more recent Pollock, there have been films that focus, with high-minded attention to detail, on the labours of the creative process itself: it is notable how many "painter movies" have been made by directors who aren't interested in conventional narrative storytelling, from Andrey Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev) to Derek Jarman (Caravaggio) to Peter Greenaway (the perplexing The Draughtsman's Contract).

I didn't think of any of those films while watching Mr Turner. Instead my reference point was a movie made nearly eight decades ago - the 1936 Rembrandt, featuring that titanic, tempestuous force of nature Charles Laughton in the title role. In fact, watching Spall in Mr Turner, I kept thinking about how well Laughton might have fit this role. And not just because of the similarities in the personal lives of the two painters. (Both Turner and Rembrandt, for instance, had long-term relationships with their housekeepers: in Rembrandt, the role of the painter's lover is played by Laughton's real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester.)

In comparing the two films, the differences are initially more striking - the most significant one being that Mr Turner makes very effective use of colour to capture the inner and outer worlds of its protagonist, while Rembrandt was shot in black and white. You'd think this would be an impediment to a film about an artist who made such rich use of colours, but after a point that doesn't matter since the film doesn't rely on exactly replicating the look of Rembrandt's work - instead it aims for more poetic truths that cut to the heart of the artistic process. In one scene, for instance, the artist convinces a beggar to pose as King Saul and starts to tell him a story. The beggar, now dressed as the king, is so moved (by the tale of Saul being moved by David's harp-playing) that he wipes a teardrop from his cheek with a corner of his robe, a moment that makes it into the painting. Even though the scene is in black and white, it connects directly with the real-life Rembrandt work it alludes to, and makes an understated observation about how an artist might get his subject "into character". Not unlike a movie director filling his own canvas with all the things he needs.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer