At first glance it’s a charming, feelgood story. This Etsy-cutesy drama based on the life of the Canadian outsider artist Maud Lewis (1903-70) tells the tale of a woman betrayed by her family, all but written off by society, who found solace in a can of paint. Maud (Sally Hawkins in a tremulous performance), channelled her compulsion to create into a cottage industry, selling her appealingly naive postcards and decorated boards to day-tripping city sophisticates. She was celebrated in the press. President Nixon owned a piece of her work.
But central to her life, and to this film by Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy), is Maud’s relationship with her husband, itinerant fish pedlar Everett Lewis (a guttural, somewhat moth-eaten Ethan Hawke). And this is where Maudie wanders into more questionable territory. Everett was both emotionally and physically violent towards his diminutive partner. The film doesn’t shy from that fact – nor should it. However, by taking an approach to this aspect of Maud’s life that is as guileless and simplistic as her drawings, by trying to smooth the splinters and rebrand the couple’s marriage as a great romance, Walsh’s film feels jarringly at odds with contemporary sensibilities. A bully is a bully, no matter how cheerfully he is painted.
It’s the score that is the most discordant. As numbing as Percocet, featuring plaintive strings that creak like arthritic joints, the music seeps into the rough edges of the story like balm. The soundtrack is insidious, and its message is that Everett is endearingly cantankerous and misunderstood; that he, like Maud, is a victim of a society that has pushed him to its periphery.
Before they married, Maud worked as Everett’s live-in housekeeper. He spells out the pecking order in the household: “There’s me. There’s the dogs. There’s the chickens, and then there’s you.” So normalised is Everett’s behaviour that when Maud later takes a stand, arguing querulously that she is, in fact, better than a dog, it feels like a major breakthrough.
Bring the life of any outsider artist to the big screen – as in documentaries such as The Devil and Daniel Johnston or In the Realms of the Unreal, about Henry Darger – and you’re likely to unearth a certain amount of suffering, mental or otherwise. Maudie finds its closest parallel in the French biopic Séraphine, a portrait of Séraphine de Senlis. A self-taught painter who lived in abject poverty and existed in the hinterland between religious fervour and mental illness, Séraphine created canvases which, like Maud’s, teemed with nature and flora.
Walsh allows the wild seascapes of Newfoundland (which doubles for the Nova Scotia setting) to bleed into Maud’s story like watercolours, a constant reminder of the natural world that fed her imagination. But the film lacks the grit and dirt of Séraphine. Maud’s pain is picturesque, filtered through a folksy, Lasse Hallström-style gauze of sunlit dust motes and artisanal squalor.
Tonal issues notwithstanding, Hawkins’s performance is impressive. It’s a physical transformation on a par with Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. Hawkins seems to shrink and twist into the role as Maud ages and arthritis ravages her joints. Despite being “born different”, and having been treated with casual cruelty because of it, Maud is as sunny and open as one of her painted flowers. She has a hiccup of a laugh and a lilting, softly-spoken voice that chimes like a nursery rhyme. She talks to her husband in the same way that she soothes a fractious animal. Ideas are slowly processed – we see them drifting across her face like the changing weather rolling in from the sea.
It’s a performance that could feel patronising but for the warmth with which Hawkins floods her character. And there are a couple of extraordinary moments. The first is a heartsick wrench of sadness which comes when she realises that her brother and aunt lied to her and abused her trust. The second is the moment when she realises, and quickly covers up, the gravity of her own failing health. “You should get another dog,” is the way she gently breaks the news to Everett . For his part, he finally, somewhat belatedly, concedes that he would prefer to keep his wife rather than trade her in for a canine replacement.
