Mr Turner, film review: A great artist, beautifully framed by director Mike Leigh

(12A) Dir. Mike Leigh; Starring Timothy Spall, Paul Jesson, 150mins

A man for all seasons: Timothy Spall stars in Mr Turner

According to Mike Leigh's impressionistic portrait of the artist as an older man, JMW Turner (or Billy to his friends and family; or Mr Mallard as he calls himself during periodical escapes into an anonymous life in Margate) was a most contradictory character.

A man with humble origins but significant wealth, at home in the parlours of the aristocracy and the upstairs of brothels; who paints commissions for the king and queen but bequeaths his work to the people; a Royal Academician but a radical, who insults John Constable and snorts at John Ruskin; who mixes his own spit and sweat into his oils, and ties himself to the mast of a ship so that he might feel the full force of the elements he hopes to tame on canvas. "A man of great spirit and fine feeling," as his Margate boarding-house landlady and later lover (Marion Bailey) describes him, who is equally capable of contempt and callousness.

As ever in Leigh's films, the character seems to have been created from the inside out. He's prone to arch turns of phrase ("I'm gonna throw myself into the arms of Morpheus," he says as he pops upstairs for a nap), and yet Timothy Spall, who won the best actor award at Cannes for this highly physical performance, expresses the most feeling with a remarkable range of guttural grunts and strangulated, bronchial wheezes, as if communication of any sort, as with artistic creation, requires major exertion.

Mr Turner is as redolent of the 1830s as Abigail's Party is of the 1970s, but the period detail on show seems exactly of a piece with the characters living amid it, not on show for the sake of it. Yet it is Leigh's most beautiful film, thanks to the way his regular cinematographer Dick Pope catches the differing character of the light "as mighty Apollo moves across his heavenly track". It frequently looks like a Turner. So too, in the way that its jumble of plotless episodes make a harmonious whole; the way that seemingly random brushstrokes begin to look deft and well placed when you step back a little; and in the sense it gives one that passion and feeling and sweat and hard work have all been poured into its creation.