Dir:

Mike Leigh

With: Timothy Spall, Paul Jesson, Dorothy Atkinson

Runtime: 150 minutes

THIS biopic of JMW Turner opens with a sunrise and closes with a sunset, fitting bookends for the life of an artist who worked miracles with light. Within these two points Mike Leigh, the director, and Timothy Spall, playing Turner as old age beckons, have their own wonders to perform. What results is a radiant, witty, exquisitely rendered piece that makes the viewer feel as if they have stood, however briefly, at the shoulder of a giant.

This is Leigh and Spall's seventh work together, and it is by far their most impressive. Like the Turner shown in the film, both men are now of an age when promise belongs in the past, reputations have long been established, and the best is always said to be yet to come. With this picture their best has just arrived.

Our first look at Turner finds him in traditional gentleman of oils pose, standing at an easel in some foreign field painting a windmill as two milk maidens hurry by on their way to work. Like every other scene in the picture, from the mundane (his father shopping for paint) to the magnificent (Turner strapped to a mast the better to look into the eye of a storm), it is perfectly composed.

Even the grubbiness, especially the grubbiness, of Victorian London is embraced. As we see Turner walking through the teeming streets, or his housekeeper preparing a pig's head for tea, one has cause to celebrate, once more, that Smell-O-vision never took off in the cinema. As in Leigh's Vera Drake, the palette is one of deliberate, relentless drabness, so that when Turner's works appear they burst like fireworks, lighting up the screen.

Leigh shows Turner's life in the round, how he worked, played and rested. While the scenes showing the soirees with rich clients and the pow-wows with Royal Academy fellows have their pleasures, the key to Turner is to be found at home, where his devoted father (Paul Jesson at his twinkly best) and a housekeeper (Dorothy Atkinson) help to shield him from life's unpleasantness, such as encounters with his estranged wife and children. In some ways this is a portrait of the artist as an indulged child, though learning what we do of Turner's past one hardly begrudges him comfort in his later years.

Like everything else in the film, Leigh, who also wrote the screenplay, supplies this background information with a delicate touch. A huge amount of learning has clearly gone into the screenplay, but it is never worn in any way but lightly. So confident is Leigh of the material and his ability to handle it that he not only covers Turner's last quarter of a century with ease, but he takes in other developments, ideas and characters of the time.

One brief scene, involving Turner and a visit from the Scottish scientist Mary Somerville (played by Lesley Manville) is like a masterclass on the ideas of both.

Where another filmmaker might shy away from such complex concepts and characters, Leigh is thoroughly at ease, so much so that there is as much comedy in the script as high drama. Can an arthouse art film be laugh out loud funny? It can when Spall is around.

For all that Leigh and a marvellous supporting cast (particularly Atkinson as the poor housekeeper whose complexion grows scalier with every appearance) contribute to Turner, it is Spall who takes the breath away. Even during the odd longueur inevitable in a 150 minute film he is like a force of nature, a source of light that illuminates and warms every-thing around him. His Turner, veering between a mumbling, growling grump and a wildly eloquent autodidact, is a joy.

He is convincing in everything he does, from painting (I was particularly taken with his gob of spit and dash of thumb technique) to portraying a desperately shy man who had to excavate his feelings like an archaeologist digging for treasure. No wonder Spall was named best actor at Cannes. Other glittering prizes will surely follow.