Monthly Archives: September 2017

  • Maudie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aisling Walsh (2016)

    The Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis (1903-70), from a young age, suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis.  Sally Hawkins, who plays her in Maudie, is extraordinarily shrunken and hobbles impressively but her gait dictates the tempo of Aisling Walsh’s slow-moving biography.  Walsh has mostly worked in television drama, where she’s built up a strong CV, including adaptations of novels and plays, among them Fingersmith (2005), in which Hawkins also appeared; the outstanding Room at the Top (2012); and An Inspector Calls (2015).   With Maudie, only her fourth cinema feature in nearly thirty years, Walsh’s touch is less sure.  She seems to be watching Sally Hawkins’s fine performance with such admiration that – as well as sacrificing pace (and changes of pace) – she doesn’t notice what’s wrong with Ethan Hawke’s playing of Everett Lewis, who becomes Maud’s husband.  A bigger weakness of the film is the screenplay, by Sherry White.

    White’s script is such a succession of clichés that the fact that Maudie is the story of a remarkable real person becomes almost irrelevant.  (It may make a difference – though surely not a big one – if you come to the film with a prior knowledge of Maud Lewis that I lacked.)   Everett, a bachelor and fish peddler in the small coastal town of Marshallstown, Nova Scotia, puts an advert in the local store for a cleaner.  Maud struggles on foot to his roadside shack for an interview.  Particular events (Everett’s gruff initial rejection of Maud, followed by second thoughts when she offers to keep house in exchange for bed and board) and larger themes (the growing interest in her art work) are handled equally predictably.  For a short while, you’re impatient for the film to get standard scenes out of the way and move into more imaginative territory.  You soon realise this won’t happen.

    An obvious, clumsy subplot concerns the illegitimate child to which the young Maud gave birth many years ago.  Her one-note despicable brother (Zachary Bennett) and her aunt (Gabrielle Rose) told Maud the baby was deformed and died.  When the aunt is herself on the way out, she reveals to her niece that the child survived and was sold by Charles for adoption.  One day, Everett drives Maud to the street where her now adult, apparently married daughter lives.  ‘How did you find her?’ Maud asks – a good question that, needless to say, goes unanswered.  Crouching by the car to avoid being spotted by the young woman, Maud murmurs, ‘She’s so beautiful’, proving that she has excellent long sight.  Shortly after this scene, I glanced at my watch and thought it was about time for Maud to fall terminally ill.  She promptly keeled over in the snow and took to her deathbed.  I get annoyed with myself for this kind of sarcasm but have no other way of venting my exasperation at Maudie‘s plod through biopic Stations of the Cross.

    The visit to the daughter’s place occurs shortly after Maud moves back to live with Everett, following a period of separation (the film’s timeframe is mostly vague and it’s not clear how long the separation lasts).  While they’re apart, Maud stays with Sandra (Kari Patchett), a New Yorker who has a second home in Marshallstown and is the first person to buy Maud’s work (in the form of Christmas cards).   Although her paintings bring in money, the graceless Everett is irritated by Maud’s increasing celebrity and especially that, after a television crew has interviewed them at home, he’s publicly (and accurately) seen as cold and unfriendly.  The revelation that Maud’s daughter is alive makes matters between the couple worse.  A couple of the (minority of) negative reviews of Maudie object to the whitewashing of Everett Lewis.  ‘A bully is a bully, no matter how cheerfully he is painted,’ writes Wendy Ide (The Observer).   According to Rob Thomas (Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin), the film ‘shouldn’t sugarcoat [Maud’s] hardships by presenting Everett as anything better than he was’.

    If Maudie does seem to soft-pedal on this (I know nothing about the real Everett), it’s partly a consequence of miscasting.  Because he’s shallow in the role, Ethan Hawke renders Everett’s persistent verbal abuse of Maud lightweight.  Although his still boyish features make him seem too young for the part, Hawke is actually in his mid-forties and so, at least in the early stages of the relationship, the right sort of age.  From his very first appearance, though, when Everett enters the local store to place the advert, Hawke is effortful:  even in this medium shot, you can see he’s putting on a backwoodsman walk.  He never gets inside the character.

    Sally Hawkins is a different matter.  It takes a little time to adjust both to her wizened appearance and to a style of acting that, by her standards, is unusually elaborate.  Once she’s absorbed the vocal and gestural mannerisms that she gives Maud, however, these come to seem quite natural, as well as individual.  Hawkins paints convincingly and has an eccentric, appealing alertness.  It feels right that her age is hard to pin down and her ageing in the course of the story is pleasingly unobtrusive.  It’s only in the nowadays obligatory archive footage of the real people with which Aisling Walsh ends the film that you see that Maud looks older than Hawkins ever does.  (This footage is also confirmation of Ethan Hawke’s physical dissimilarity to the real Everett.)

    The other reason for the seemingly gentle treatment of Everett that displeased Wendy Ide and Rob Thomas is that the Maud-Everett relationship is, for the most part, cocooned in odd-couple innocuousness.   This is most explicit when, on their wedding night, Maud calls them ‘a couple of odd socks’.  (In perhaps the most unlikely bit of writing in the whole script, Everett turns briefly poetic and extends the metaphor, describing himself as a grey, lumpy old sock.) It’s not easy to tell from Maudie what sort of celebrity the protagonist enjoyed in her lifetime:  at one point, but one point only, there’s a crowd milling around the shack in whose front window her paintings are displayed.  The crowd’s fleeting appearance may be either a comment on the fickleness of public interest or a matter of convenience for the film-makers but it’s presumably true that Maud became well known enough for Vice-President Nixon to buy one of her paintings in the 1950s.  The contrast between their typically bright colours and the muted tones of the landscape, shot by native Nova Scotian Guy Godfree, is one of the film’s main strengths.  Another, if lesser, virtue is Michael Timmins’s discreet score.

    24 August 2017

  • Final Portrait

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Tucci (2017)

    While James Lord was visiting Paris in 1964, his friend Alberto Giacometti asked him to sit for a portrait.  Flattered and intrigued, Lord agreed.  He was shortly to return to the United States but Giacometti assured him the sitting shouldn’t take more than a couple of days.  In the event, the portrait took rather longer:  dissatisfied with his work, Giacometti kept erasing what he’d drawn – or most of what he’d drawn – and starting again; Lord kept re-booking his flight home.  According to Stanley Tucci’s film about this episode, the sitting ended only when Lord, realising it could go on indefinitely, decided to stand up for himself.  Tucci, who wrote as well as directed Final Portrait, reproduces the feelings of exasperation and claustrophobia that James Lord experiences.  I stayed in my seat but might have walked if the movie had been much longer than its ninety minutes.  In retrospect, I’m relieved I already was a Giacometti fan and had read and liked Lord’s 2004 book Mythic Giacometti:  if my introduction to them had been through Final Portrait, it would have acted as a deterrent.

    The secondary meaning of Tucci’s title may be close to a literal description of the drawing of Lord, who explains in his closing voiceover that Giacometti died ‘soon afterwards’ (actually in January 1966).  But the title primarily refers to a contradiction in terms:  the film seems to share Giacometti’s view that a work of art is inherently and inevitably a work in progress.  He makes this explicit when he tells Lord that photography has rendered portraiture in art to some extent obsolete – that this makes it essential for the latter to be incomplete.  In spite of berating himself for failing to realise what he wants to achieve from drawing Lord, Giacometti also accepts this endless striving as fundamental to the artist’s job (‘All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay’).  Tucci succeeds in dramatising this idea but at only a basic level:  he hardly develops it.

    We assume that Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) is relatively satisfied with his rendering of Lord’s eyes, which always remain after the rest of the portrait is rubbed out.  The contrast between their haunted expression and the blandly handsome features of the sitter (Armie Hammer) provides one of the film’s strongest images – along with a shot of Giacometti walking in the rain with his coat pulled nearly over his head.  (I was predisposed to notice the latter.  It’s presumably inspired by a photograph of Giacometti  ‘on Rue d’Alésia, Paris, 1961’:  I cut this out of the TLS years ago and still have it pinned up in the study.)  Although Danny Cohen’s muted, verging-on-monochrome palette gives it a distinctive look, Final Portrait isn’t that visually interesting:  the artist’s studio contains plenty of his emaciated little men sculptures but they’re background figures, part of the set dressing.  Giacometti’s remark about photography as a usurper stands out in the two principals’ conversations about art.  Since James Lord went on to write acclaimed biographies of both Giacometti and Picasso, what Tucci gives him to say about their work is surprisingly tame.  When Giacometti bitches about Picasso and Braque, Lord replies that the Cubists ‘made pretty things’ and that he thinks Alberto is ‘being a bit hard’.  Giacometti’s portrait of Lord is, according to the latter, ‘good’.

    I got the impression that Stanley Tucci felt that Giacometti’s extraordinary ménage – the man himself, his ill-used wife Annette (Sylvie Testud), his favourite prostitute Caroline (Clémence Poésy), his brother Diego (Tony Shalhoub) – would be irresistibly entertaining.  Whether they are is a matter of personal taste, of course, and the people on the screen mostly got on my nerves.  The Hot Club de France-type jazz violin music that accompanies the narrative made matters worse.  (I assume this was pastiche rather than a Stéphane Grappelli track.   If so, Evan Lurie, who scored the film, emulates the torturous effect of listening to Grappelli.)   Giacometti’s relationships with Annette, Caroline and Diego – and James Lord – yield insights into his personality and working methods that are clear but not rich.

    Geoffrey Rush, with his craggy features, is something of an artwork himself.  His head is almost a sculpture.  In profile at least, he resembles Giacometti.  But the part is so thinly written that Rush always seems what he is here:  a major actor doing a standard-issue genius turn.  Stanley Tucci’s Giacometti is unreasonably demanding of other people and of himself – you know, the way artists are.  (He even has madly untidy hair.)  Armie Hammer’s role is unrewarding – he’s Tucci’s stooge, as much as Lord is Giacometti’s.  The artist tells the sitter he has the look of a brute, the look of a man who could kill another man.  Hammer’s flawless, innocuous face is enough to convince you that Alberto Giacometti’s gifts include an unusual depth of perception.

    22 August 2017

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