Hawkins' complex performance paints 'Maudie' with grace and restraint
"Maudie" tells the fairly conventional story of an outcast artist, one given unconventional grace and restraint by British actress Sally Hawkins, whose quiet dealings with injustice and tragedy never beg for our affections, but earn them with pluck and honesty.
It's a boldly understated and unapologetically sentimental fact-based drama that testifies to love's transformative power and to art's great capacity to absorb the shocks of a tragic life.
Hawkins plays Maud Lewis, a smart, introspective, Nova Scotia woman suffering from arthritic hands and a severe limp. She grows up to become a renowned natural artist who would one day sell a painting to U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
During the 1930s, young Maud resents being under the control of her judgmental Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose) and her opportunistic brother Charles (Zachary Bennett).
When stressed, Maud often retreats to her inner world by painstakingly painting simple subjects - flowers, insects, animals - on her bedpost and wall.
After Charles sells the family home for his own gain, an outraged, fiercely independent Maud strikes out on her own. She accepts a job as live-in maid for a socially inept, chauvinistic, impulsively coarse fish salesman named Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke, who has never put his cold, gray eyes to better use).
They do not make a good match, especially confined inside Everett's incredibly tiny, 10-by-12-foot house.
Everett treats his housekeeper terribly, but she has been subjected to much worse. She tells him how local boys throw rocks at her in the street. No one stops them.
Gradually, extremely so, the two form a bond that eventually crosses over into a seemingly impossible romance, a relationship wordlessly conveyed in a series of picturesque, widescreen landscapes by cinematographer Guy Godfree.
In the first one, we see a long-shot of Maud slowly walking across a vast expanse of lonely open space. Later, Maud walks with Everett across the same open space, but he leaves her far behind.
Then, as their romance begins, we see the same scene again, but Maud now rides in a wheel barrow energetically pushed along by Everett.
"Maudie" is directed by Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh, who allows the complex relationship between Maud and Everett to unfold at a proper pace. It begins as a master-and-servant dynamic that gradually evolves into what "Beauty and the Beast" would call "something more."
Actress Kari Matchett brings sophistication and empathy to Sandra, a New York high society type who becomes the first to recognize Maud's talent and commissions her to paint something just for her.
"Show me how you see the world!" Sandra challenges Maud.
And she does, in simple images of childlike innocence and curiosity, the same qualities that Hawkins employs in one of the year's most memorable performances.
“Maudie”
★ ★ ★
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett
Directed by: Aisling Walsh
Other: A Sony Pictures Classics release. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations. 115 minutes