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PMr. Turner

Opens Fri., Jan 23 at Sundance and Lincoln Square. Rated R. 149 minutes.

Must the great man also be a nice guy? The movies give us conflicted signals these days, from The Imitation Game (pro-crank) to Selma (dignity slathered on dignity). English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) was unquestionably a genius, and recognized as such in his day, but Mike Leigh’s comprehensive biopic tempers our admiration for the man. Covering the last 25 years of his life, with very few guideposts along the way, Mr. Turner is all about process. (So too is Leigh’s filmmaking method.) We see paint being mixed, canvases being stretched, rival artists sparring at a group show, patrons being flattered, and the mechanisms of the sale. Turner (Timothy Spall), when we meet him, is famous, prosperous, and possessed of a nice London home, where buyers are carefully ushered into his salesroom. He spies on clients through a pinhole while his cagey old father (Paul Jesson) reveals the color swirls of landscapes and marine paintings that are just beginning to edge toward abstraction. Turner is an artist, but also an entrepreneur. Besides William Sr., his business is run by the devoted maid Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), who’s plainly, painfully in love with her indifferent master. (He is by turns tender and terrible to the women who surround him.)

“Remember me, but forget my fate,” sings Turner, somewhere near the right key, when he encounters a harpsichord player at the estate of a potential buyer. That he knows Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas shouldn’t be entirely surprising: This self-made man, son of a barber, is constantly quoting the Greeks and citing Continental paintings that few of his countrymen have ever laid eyes on. Yet though well-traveled and cultured, he plays up his uncouthness for his clients (some noblemen, some tycoons in a newly industrialized England). He’s a bit of a showman when others watch him paint, hamming up his gestures at the easel and spitting on the canvas to blur the colors and shapes. Is that a ship, a rock, or a wave? Turner and his art are mutable. He travels under an assumed name to the coastal village of Margate, where he eventually takes a new lover, Sophia (Marion Bailey), to replace poor Hannah.

As Turner ages and grows out of fashion (young Queen Victoria scoffs at the “dirty yellowness” of one painting), Leigh and his Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope periodically pull us out of the artist’s quotidian. In widescreen (not Turner’s own ratio), the movie pauses for us to see 19th-century views as he did: lambent light on a Flemish canal, the sun filtered through sea mist near the shore, locomotive steam bursting into a halo above the green countryside, and—this shot made me gasp—a digital recreation of 1839’s The Fighting Temeraire, a famous battleship being towed up the Thames to be rendered as scrap. Unlike his peers, Turner observes the scene without pity: There goes history, about to be transformed into salable art.

Thanks to Spall’s marvelous, gruntingly animalistic performance, Pope’s eye, and Leigh’s deep methodology, Mr. Turner gives us an immersion if not an understanding of the gnomic artist. (At one point he calls himself “a gargoyle.”) There’s no plot, no real structure beyond the alternating domestic scene/beauty shot pattern, and the would-be analysis of the lisping young critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) is mostly played for laughs. Turner is a selfish yet sensitive man, uncompromising in his art and personal life, resistant to interpretation. I won’t speculate how much Leigh might identify with him, but the respect is total. The filmmaker frames him in a portrait, leaving us to grope for psychological shapes and colors. Brian Miller

PA Most Violent Year

Opens Fri., Jan 23 at Guild 45th, 
Lincoln Square, and meridian. 
Rated R. 125 minutes.

In the wintry air of A Most Violent Year, a would-be business magnate named Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) sports a handsome camel-hair topcoat. He’d like to achieve success the honest way, and that immaculate coat is like his shining armor. Problem is, this is 1981-era New York, the business is heating oil, and nothing stays clean for very long here. Writer/director J.C. Chandor is skillful with these details—this is a very intricate story—and quiet in his approach. Abel’s jacket is the flashiest thing about the movie.

The opening sequence has Abel and his lawyer (a fine Albert Brooks) striking a deal to buy a choice piece of East River waterfront. If Abel can just secure the financing to close the deal in a few days’ time, he’ll be set up for life in the heating-oil game; and he’ll have gotten there—at least according to his own bearings—honestly. Then the financing collapses (longtime Seattle actor John Procaccino delivers nicely in a couple of scenes as a banker), and Abel must scramble to get money from people who do not usually keep their coats so clean. Added to the pressure is an insinuating district attorney (Selma star David Oyelowo) and Abel’s fierce wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), who happens to be the daughter of a local mobster. It’s possible she admires Abel for his ethical stance, but her take on life is a little worldlier than his. Beneath the Armani dresses is a Lady Macbeth who will do what needs to get done. The actors are a splendid pair: Isaac, of Inside Llewyn Davis, captures the immigrant’s go-go drive for success; and the only problem with Chastain in this film is that she isn’t in it enough.

This is a chess-game kind of plot, where each move affects a dozen other moves. The pieces include not just politicians and goodfellas, but also truck drivers and salesmen. At the lower end of the food chain, Elyes Gabel and Catalina Sandino Moreno play a working-class couple directly damaged by all these machinations. In creating this dog-eat-dog world, Chandor doesn’t exactly make fresh observations. His first two films, Margin Call and All Is Lost, were more startling and original. But he does manage the game with dexterity, and the re-creation of a grungy era is completely convincing. On the latter point, Chandor is paying respect to a serious American moviemaking style employed 40 years ago by directors like Sidney Lumet and Francis Ford Coppola, in which a system’s structure is brought into the cold, hard light. Chandor’s update proves there’s plenty of material still cloaked in darkness. Robert Horton

Song One

Opens Fri., Jan 23 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated PG-13. 88 minutes.

People who don’t like musicals always fall back on the Realism Argument, contending that in real life we don’t start singing during conversations or solo walks in the Alps or whenever. This argument can be answered in a variety of ways: Don’t most of us have a soundtrack on shuffle in our heads? More important, who says musicals are supposed to be realistic?

The indie musical, embodied by the 2006 sleeper Once, has tried to sneak around the argument. In these movies people sing because they’re musicians; they sidle up to music, they shrug their way through a tune. They emphatically do not plant their feet and belt out a showstopper in the Broadway tradition. That sort of modesty (or is it embarrassment?) can be effective, although just as often the result feels as artificial as a Rodgers and Hammerstein showstopper. Case in point: Song One, in which music threads through the tale of a street busker who spends most of the film in a coma. I always feel bad for actors cast as coma victims, so let’s mention his name here: Ben Rosenfield plays Henry, a starving musician who ends up in the hospital after an accident. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway) returns from studying anthropology in the Middle East to tend to him; also at the bedside is their mother (Mary Steenburgen), a stock irresponsible-ex-hippie character.

Franny listens to her brother’s music and frequents his favorite haunts—they’d been slightly estranged, and the script insists she does this to get to know him better. She also strikes up a bond with Henry’s hero, a sensitive folkie songwriter named James Forester (Johnny Flynn). He’s got sensitivity, musical chops, and an accent, which means he doesn’t have to shower much to succeed with women. They do some impromptu singing together and grow close. The kid stays in the coma.

You can see that writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland is sincere, and in fact the film is admirable for avoiding conventional A-B-C plotting; scenes tend to drift into each other in an unpredictable way, and the movie’s got a dark, tough look. But there’s something just too precious about it all, and there’s also Anne Hathaway. I do not dislike the Internet-reviled Hathaway, who won an Oscar for her last musical, Les Miserables. But introspection and angst do not sit easily with her super-square personality, and Song One tends to vanish into her very earnest eyes, like a song that trails off in the air. Robert Horton

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