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