Maudie (12A.)
Directed by Aisling Walsh.
Starring Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett, Zachary Bennett and Gabrielle Rose. 116 mins
Sometimes, just sometimes, life turns out OK. In a remote community in Nova Scotia, Maud (Hawkins), a woman afflicted with severe arthritis, decides that her life choices are so bleak that becoming a house maid to a gruff, anti-social fish peddler (Hawke) in his tiny one-room shack, is her best option. During the opening exchanges, as the two leads trade thespian tics – Hawkins offering an array of hobbles, twisted limbs and hunchbacked hopefully smile; Hawke responding with quizzical squints, fraught gurns and stilted anger – I sank despairingly into my chair. Really? Two hours of this – My Life Foot romancing Rainman in a shed?
Our redemption is art. Maud likes to paint and people begin to admire, and buy, her simplistic, naive landscapes. (Her painting is respectfully defined as Folk Art: the kind of painting your child could do, but somehow never does.) The film has a similar aesthetic. There are no extraneous details, no explanations, no flourishes, just the simplicity of life. The barren terrain sucks the show out of these two potential showy performances. They bend to the force of the landscape and become real. There's too much proper work needs doing for any thespian extravagances to be indulged.
The film is a celebration of the simple pleasure of existence, which is a difficult thing to get across effectively in the movies. This succeeds through being very sparse and straightforward. Throughout the film you can sense the way that the script has bent and shaped the truth of Maud and Everett's life to fit into something like a conventional dramatic scheme, but the centre of the film is still just the pair of them, simply existing, getting by, looking on the bright side of a life that many people would feel was more of a hell.
What really impresses is the way it captures the sense of a life lived. The film's two hours follow Maud from her early thirties to her death and in that time you get a real feeling of having seen the essence of a life pass before your eyes.
Directed by Aisling Walsh.
Starring Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett, Zachary Bennett and Gabrielle Rose. 116 mins
Sometimes, just sometimes, life turns out OK. In a remote community in Nova Scotia, Maud (Hawkins), a woman afflicted with severe arthritis, decides that her life choices are so bleak that becoming a house maid to a gruff, anti-social fish peddler (Hawke) in his tiny one-room shack, is her best option. During the opening exchanges, as the two leads trade thespian tics – Hawkins offering an array of hobbles, twisted limbs and hunchbacked hopefully smile; Hawke responding with quizzical squints, fraught gurns and stilted anger – I sank despairingly into my chair. Really? Two hours of this – My Life Foot romancing Rainman in a shed?
Our redemption is art. Maud likes to paint and people begin to admire, and buy, her simplistic, naive landscapes. (Her painting is respectfully defined as Folk Art: the kind of painting your child could do, but somehow never does.) The film has a similar aesthetic. There are no extraneous details, no explanations, no flourishes, just the simplicity of life. The barren terrain sucks the show out of these two potential showy performances. They bend to the force of the landscape and become real. There's too much proper work needs doing for any thespian extravagances to be indulged.
The film is a celebration of the simple pleasure of existence, which is a difficult thing to get across effectively in the movies. This succeeds through being very sparse and straightforward. Throughout the film you can sense the way that the script has bent and shaped the truth of Maud and Everett's life to fit into something like a conventional dramatic scheme, but the centre of the film is still just the pair of them, simply existing, getting by, looking on the bright side of a life that many people would feel was more of a hell.
What really impresses is the way it captures the sense of a life lived. The film's two hours follow Maud from her early thirties to her death and in that time you get a real feeling of having seen the essence of a life pass before your eyes.
