Movie Review: War & Art – Part 2

Maudie

By Jonathan Price

A very different kind of film from Dunkirk [reviewed yesterday] is Maudie, an indie biopic about a Canadian folk artist, Maud Lewis, which played in only two theatres in town for a week. Like Dunkirk, it is based “on a true story.” But Maud’s life and art are different from our common parables about human existence, or the life of an artist. And so the film is a commentary on the intensity and power of personal vision, dedication to beauty, and the transcendence of loneliness and suffering. A single film can do all that. Maud lived her entire life in a small town in Nova Scotia, and most of her adult life in a small house on its outskirts.

Maud’s beginnings were not auspicious. When we first see her (played by Sally Hawkins), she is being deposited as an adult at her aunt’s home by her brother, who has sold the family house and can’t take care of her any more. She suffers from a partially crippling type of arthritis. Neither of her relatives is sympathetic; her brother is obsessed with money; her aunt never offers anything but criticism. But Maud likes to paint and even goes to a nightclub on the weekend and dances by herself. What gradually emerges is the intensity of her own vision and the subtle and determined ways in which she pursues it. She notices an ad put up by a local near illiterate fish peddler named Everett Lewis for a live-in cleaning woman, and walks several miles relatively slowly but deliberately to apply. This terse and seemingly unemotional housemate, played in powerful understatement by Ethan Hawke, is demanding and grudging, but allows her to decorate with paint surfaces and odd boards around the house and assumes she will sleep in the same bed. Without outrage or intense argument, when Everett begins intercourse, Maud interrupts, suggesting marriage. As in so many modest and great things, she persists and gets her way. She is clever and appealing in appeasing a neighboring customer who complains about some of the fish she was sold, but also accepts Maud’s decorated cards as part of the bargain and begins to pay her for them. Though Everett hardly seems thoughtful or romantic, in many scenes he accommodates Maud’s disability by pushing her around in a handcart, in idyllic scenes surrounded by snow.

The real Maud Lewis

Maud has a passion for painting, and we see her not only painting boards and holiday cards, but also her walls and windows, with decorations from nature. (Eventually Maud Lewis painted virtually every surface in her house with birds, flowers, oxen, snowy landscapes—even the stove and the exterior walls; the house and she were such a phenomenon that after her death, contributors from the community rescued it, entire, from dereliction and installed it whole in the regional art museum in Halifax.) We see Maud selling her painted works occasionally outside her house; she charges nickels and dimes, eventually $5. Ultimately she even gets a request for a painting from Vice-President Nixon. Her fame brings her media attention and a film crew to the house. We never hear of any of her art work being sold for much more than $25.
    As Maud’s aunt ages and gets ill, Maud demands of her husband to visit her only living relative. When he refuses, she walks the miles to town to see her aunt. In a powerful scene, the aunt, a total critic and cynic and actually far more lonely than Maud, acknowledges not only that Maud is a success—this is the traditional narrative arc of such films, though Maud is far from wealthy. The aunt says that of all the members of her family, Maud is the only one who is happy. Which we now realize is true—despite her disability, her genteel poverty, her frequently distant spouse, she has found materials from life that give her joy, and has continued to paint until her death. Such lives deserve recognition.

Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Price