An inconvenient truth | 3 August 2017

Maudie is a biopic of the folk artist Maud Lewis (1903–70) who is, apparently, beloved in Canada, and while Sally Hawkins is superb in the title role, and she will win you over (eventually), you do have to buy it as ‘a beautiful love story’. I bought it, hook, line and sinker — such a beautiful love story! — but then I read up on Maud (damn the internet) and had to significantly unbuy it. Does it matter that it may not be ‘the truth’? Or that a woman who was, in fact, severely disabled is presented mostly as someone with a slight hobble? I don’t know, frankly. But I am certainly putting it out there.

Set in and around Digby, the small Nova Scotia community where the artist lived all her life, it opens with Maud in her early thirties, when she’s homeless, in effect. Her parents have died, her brother has sold the family home, and now she’s being foisted on Aunt Ida. Maud was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis which, in reality, meant she was tiny — she was ultimately buried in a child’s coffin — while her shoulders were hunched, her chin was pressed into her chest, and her fingers were deformed. She looked like a little gnome, said those who knew her. But this is no My Left Foot, so here the disability has been reduced to that slight hobble, which isn’t even noticeable initially. It does make you wonder: what else has been softened and prettified here?

Maud moves in with Aunt Ida, who is hateful. Maud longs to escape and, in the local store, encounters gruff, taciturn Everett Lewis (a grunting Ethan Hawke). He’s a fish peddler placing an ad for a housemaid.