Maudie Review
dir by Aisling Walsh
Aisling Walsh’s Maudie is a delicate portrait of a woman who fills up the narrow space she is allotted in life with a tender yet fierce determination. The film is brimming with pain but the love story that frames the meek portrait of Maud’s degeneration, the trauma she carries over her lost child, and Everett’s hostility towards her, is colorful enough to sustain the viewer’s heart throughout the film, though it is not an easy film to watch. There is an unpredictably amusing albeit discomfiting quality to Sally Hawkins’ performance as Maud. Her character is attractive in an uneasy way – one is attracted to her unexpected charm and wry sense of humor, but at the same time made uneasy by this natural attraction to her character because the awkwardness of her movements has a caustic underpin as it is the consequence of her proliferating arthritis. One is both attracted but equally repelled and her performance produces a rigorous pathos. Maud’s arthritis becomes increasingly worse as the film progresses, and it is hard to watch. One instance that comes to mind is when she falls headlong into the snow and the camera captures this from behind, both her feet raised in the air after the fall. (1:39:29)
The film is a biopic: it is based on the real life of folk artist, Maud Lewis, who painted in Nova Scotia from the 1920s to the 1970s. As depicted in the film, the real-life Lewis lived in poverty in a small house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. Also as represented in the film, she was married to an Everett Lewis, a fish peddler, who lived in the tiny house with her. Walsh sheds light on this female artist who has increasingly become a source of fascination for many art historians as Lewis’s paintings have grown exponentially in price over the past fifty years since her death in 1970. Her later works, which were selling in the ‘70s for five dollars a piece, are now being sold, in some instances, for well over fifty thousand. Her paintings from her earlier work through to her later consistently use vivid colors, simple forms, and a lack of shadows – they are quite flat. As much as the film is a painting that honors this female artist and her life, it also does a remarkable job of putting her work into context and honoring the medium of folk art itself.
The relationship between Sandra, a wealthy woman who comes from New York City to stay in Nova Scotia and buys fish from Everett, and Maud, is just as precious as the relationship that Maud and Everett share, and perhaps foregrounds the qualities that make Maud so special better than the relationship with Everett does. It is Maud’s unique charm that captivates Sandra when we first meet her in the film and a charm that Sandra immediately correlates with the characteristic of a figure painting on a wall inside the house that she catches a glance of when she comes by to complain that the fish she had purchased from Everett never arrived. “Who painted that happy little chicken?” she asks Maud through a puff of her cigarette smoke. Indeed, the bouyant optimism and happy quality of the paintings is the hallmark of Maud’s work; they are so uplifting to look at. I encourage readers to view her works if they haven’t already done so.
Sandra commissions a painting from Maud for five dollars – Maud’s first ever sale of her artwork, though she has been painting since she was a little girl. Sandra tells Maud, “You can paint me anything you want. Show me how you see the world. You can send it to me in New York” (0:57:45). Later in the film, she also asks Maud to teach her how to paint (1:26:27). To which Maud snickers and asserts to Sandra “You can’t teach that.” Maud’s response here is important because it reveals a mystical feature of folk art: it is an art form that can be learned formally or informally, and can be self-taught, as in Maud’s case. In addition to this compelling property of folk art, it also bears a decidedly inclusive property in that it is inclusive of class, status, culture, community, ethnicity, gender, and religion. In other words, how I interpret this feature, is that the content, subject matter, and material of folk art, as well as its audience, transcends intersectional partialities and blind spots. This is what enables Sandra and Maud, women of different classes, to bond over the work. The fluidity of the work – the way in which it can occupy a variety of spaces and meanings – makes its value arbitrary and dependent upon its environment. For Maud, the artwork and wall paintings are purely decorative and part and parcel of her housekeeping. But Sandra, bringing her socioeconomic background to bear on the work, immediately ascribes their value as being a means of commerce. And so, the women participate in a beautiful exchange of value here: Sandra takes with her the spiritual value of the work, and Maud the economic – both equally useful to each woman for different reasons. The way in which people from all backgrounds can potentially come together to find new uses and meanings for folk art is something the movie expresses well in scenes shared between Sandra and Maud.
The narrow space that Maud is given to fill as best she can is encased not only by the confines of her arthritis but also by her relationships with men and the way that they restrict her. Her brother, Charles, sells off their mother’s house without her consent in order to pay off his own personal debts. Maud never sees any money from this sale; she is treated like a child by her brother. Charles pays their Aunt Ida to look after Maud, and Maud’s only option is to continue living under her dominion until she finds the sign that Everett has posted in the local general store “looking for a housemaid.” Charles returns later in the film to Everett’s to inquire about Maud’s nascent popularity as a painter: “Aunt Ida said you don’t see a nickel of money from these paintings…why isn’t he adding onto the house, getting the place wired (1:11:14)…you need someone to give you advice on how to handle your money” (1:11:58). This scene demonstrates an interesting tension in the film. When Everett asks this, Maud replies that he “loves money too much” – and cites the instance of him selling their mother’s house because he was a debtor, as proof. She implies, with her response, that leaving her husband Everett to handle her finances is the most favorable among undesirable choices. Here, Walsh and screenwriter White highlight how the subterfuges of the patriarchy are not above exploiting an innocent and sick elderly female artist who happens to come upon financial success by sheer luck. And yet, again, viewers witness Maud’s trademark determination and resilience. She never complains; she simply tinkers through whatever obstacles she faces, and she softens, ever so slightly, Everett’s hard heart. We see a subtle shift of power between Maud and Everett when, after Maud has begun to devote more of her work during the day to her painting and less to housekeeping, Everett makes an unlikely compromise with Maud: “I’ll do the sweeping, but I’m not doing everything.”
The film score is lovely, and I’ve linked it below this review. Like the unifying force of folk art discussed above, folk music also maintains an appeal to a general community and connotes sharing and timelessness. In the movie, the soundtrack is comprised of songs primarily by Michael Timmins, who wrote the score, with a couple of additions from other female artists: Canadian singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara and Irish musician and singer Lisa Hannigan. The music falls into the genre of alternative country and folk rock and pairs well with the alluring landscape shots of Nova Scotia.
Another sign of Maud’s oxlike strength can be found in the way she repeatedly downplays her illness despite walking with a marked limp. Everett aggressively throws Maud out of his house on her first day of work and in the cut to the next scene in the sequence, set the morning after, we see that Maud has cleaned the entire house, and against the muted colors – the beiges and browns – of Everett’s mannish, humble home, is a can of vivid robin’s-egg blue paint that Maud unearths in the clutter of the home and uses to paint a mantlepiece; it is arguably the most visually intriguing scene in the film. The audience observes Maud’s perseverance to show Everett that she is worthy and suitable for the position, retaining the undying optimism that the real-life Maud Lewis translated to her own paintings.
Star Rating: 3.8 out of 5
Links to Explore:
1. “What is Folk Art?”
https://www.internationalfolkart.org/learn/what-is-folk-art.html
2. “3 Rare Maud Lewis Paintings Fetch Well Above Estimates in Online Auction”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/maud-lewis-early-work-auction-sale-1.7051960
3. Maudie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
4. Maudie Original Screenplay
https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/maudie-2017.pdf