Maudie Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett. Directed by Aisling Walsh. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday at Green Valley Ranch and Suncoast.
Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is a national treasure in her native country, but she’s not nearly as well-known beyond its borders. The biopic Maudie takes some knowledge of Lewis’ career for granted, focusing instead on her tumultuous relationship with her husband Everett. Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke give fine, emotionally rich performances as Maud and Everett, respectively, but there are a lot of details about Lewis’ work and artistic development that get sacrificed in favor of sometimes overwrought relationship drama.
The Lewises have an odd relationship, beginning when Maud, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis, applies to work as Everett’s housekeeper in a desperate attempt to assert her independence from her overbearing aunt. But the taciturn, surly Everett, who lives in a tiny house in rural Nova Scotia, works odd jobs and can barely afford to pay Maud anything. Living in close quarters, sleeping in the same bed, the two soon become intimate and eventually marry, but Everett never really stops treating Maud like an employee (albeit an unpaid one).
Director Aisling Walsh and screenwriter Sherry White don’t sugarcoat the Lewises’ emotionally abusive marriage, and Hawke plays Everett as a resentful cheapskate who never quite appreciates his wife’s talent. And yet the movie also depicts genuine affection in the couple’s marriage, which lasted 30-plus years until Maud’s death in 1970. In the meantime, Maud becomes a minor art-world sensation with her simple pastoral paintings, produced on scraps of wood and small cards, sold out of the couple’s home for only a few dollars apiece. Aisling and Hawkins successfully convey Maud’s joy at the simple act of painting (she eventually paints nearly every surface of the Lewises’ meager home), but the progression of her career is often unclear, as is the reason that so many art aficionados flocked to her work. Kari Matchett plays a vacationing New Yorker who promotes Maud’s art, representing the big-city sophistication that the Lewises don’t really understand, but her character exists mainly to provide exposition.
That’s the problem with most of the movie’s supporting characters, a typical issue with biopics that span decades. Aside from Maud and Everett, everyone else in the movie is merely a signpost to move the couple’s life story ahead, and yet it’s still difficult to follow the passage of time. The movie stumbles within the framework of the great-artist biopic, but it can be affecting as a depiction of a troubled, complex and sometimes tender romance.
