Maudie (15)

Directed by Aisling Walsh

5/5

MAUDIE’S synopsis resembles unalloyed Hollywood melodrama.

It tells the true story of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis who, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, became a legendary self-taught primitive painter and, amazingly, world-famous too.

Not for the first time, real life trumps cinematic fiction in director Aisling Walsh’s riveting and heartbreaking biopic of the anti-social Lewis.

Its considerable emotional power primarily derives from Sally Hawkins’s moving portrait of a unique character who rightly dominates this extraordinary film.

In small-town Nova Scotia — beautifully realised in Guy Godfree’s fine location cinematography — the independent-minded Lewis is rejected by her aunt and dismal brother and goes to work as maid for cantankerous fish peddler Everett (Ethan Hawke) in his minute house.

There, having to share a bed with him, she warms towards Everett and, despite constant friction between the unlikely pair, there is genuine love between them. She marries him — “We’re like a pair of odd socks” — and, surprisingly, starts to paint.

Lewis’s fascinatingly naive paintings achieve startling popularity and fame, with US vice-president Nixon purchasing one, and she finds international renown.

Hawkins is nothing short of sensational. She doesn’t so much play her unique character as become her. The arthritic deficiencies are never simply dramatic tropes but essentially part of the unique persona she constructs.

Hawke is suitably brutal, foulmouthed and a convincing bully in the early part of the drama. But unfortunately, unlike Hawkins, he never really appears to age as the story progresses.

That said, Walsh’s to-the-point direction, Sherry White’s sharp and unsentimental screenplay and Hawkins’s haunting performance make Maudie an absolute must-see.