This is a challenging movie

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I too do not like movies that spoon-feed their audience, but neither do I appreciate films that are intentionally lacking in plot.
This movie is exquisitely photographed, acted, and directed. I have great respect for those elements, but I never felt emotionally involved with the story or characters. It left me impressed, but cold.

I'm all for challenging filmmaking, but I don't feel it ought to come at the expense of entertainment. I thought this movie was dire beyond belief. The only challenge was staying awake until the end. I could understand the dialogue well enough - even got most of the allusions, thank you very much - but I thought the script was sloppily structured, the direction was dull, and the music score was horrible, intrusive, and showed no development. Several scenes seemed irrelevant (like the section with Lesley Manville, where the camera seems more interested in her and Turner's father than Turner himself) and the screenplay and/or editing (hard to tell which is more to blame) did nothing to convey a sense of passing time. The film takes place over a period of 25 years, yet it doesn't seem like that at all because there's no spine holding it all together, no unifying vision. It felt like watching a big bunch of scenes lumped together in the editing room. I'm all in favour of not spoon-feeding audiences, but structurally this film was just a hodgepodge - it just progresses willy, nilly as we follow Turner from one place to the next. Often one simple "cut" - i.e. from one image to the next - means that years have gone by, yet there's no impression conveyed, and how scenes follow on from previous scenes often seemed abrupt if not wholly arbitrary and random. There's no sense of internal coherence, and watching it was made even more tiresome because almost every scene had the same slow pace. I would call that sloppiness, artlessness, lack of vision, before I'd call it "challenging". The performaces were for the most part very good, though Spall has been significantly overpraised; this was not a great performance, and sometimes it teetered on the verge of cartoonishness (the first scene showing him kind of morphing into this ugly, rotten-toothed old man I thought he was turning into Wormtail!).

I agree on the dialogue being pretty difficult to understand. My solution was to regularly pause and look one or two words up, as well as looking up famous painters and their works appearing in the movie. I took some four hours to watch it, but what a joy to get it to last for so long.

The dialogue wasn’t hard at all to understand.

The language is hard to understand because of the accents and mumbling. I had to put subtitles on.


Citing NASA as experts on these matters is like citing the KK on matters of race relations.
- rj

I agree with everything that you have said. Let me add that I thought that it was beautifully filmed. I felt that the movie effectively transported me back to 19th century England with nice insights into how people lived and especially the insights into Turner's thoughts, of how he exposed himself to different facets of life, and how that impacted his art. I enjoyed the movie but like you struggled with following the dialog at times and figuring out who the characters were and their relationship to Turner.