Maudie (12A)

Four stars

Dir: Aisling Walsh

With: Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett

Runtime: 116 minutes

THERE are many things that can strike despair into the heart of a film reviewer (well, this one anyway). They include an advertised runtime in the neighbourhood of three hours; the words “hilarious” and “Adam Sandler” on a poster; and an opening shot of an able-bodied actor playing a disabled person, as British actor Sally Hawkins does in Maudie.

From My Left Foot and Rain Man to Born on the Fourth of July and I Am Sam, cinema has a lot of questionable form in this area. It is not just that there are unemployed disabled actors out there who could do with the gigs, but having a disability seems something that cannot, and should not, be faked without a very good reason.

Director Aisling Walsh has two such reasons. First, she has Hawkins. Second, she has a story that deserves airing, that of Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis. When first we see Lewis she is deep at work on a painting, the rheumatoid arthritis from which she suffered all her life forcing her into body into painful shapes, the effort of doing what she loves making her breathing laboured. This is Lewis towards the end of her career, when her work was a favourite of the New York swish set and the tourist alike. Her unshowy paintings of deer, cats, snowy landscapes and the like even found favour with Tricky Dicky in the White House.

How Lewis got to that summit is the stuff of Walsh’s thoughtful, moving, and often slyly funny picture that fittingly overcomes preconceptions as surely as its subject did.

From that opening scene Walsh homes in on the details of Lewis’s beginnings. It is the 1920s and Maud, by then a young woman, is living with her stern aunt in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. With her parents gone and the family home recently sold, she expects to receive some money. Already painting, she wants not just a room of her own, but a life. Her brother has other ideas, telling Maud it is best for her if she stays with the aunt, being looked after as if she was a child.

Determined not to be defeated, Maud applies for a live-in maid’s job with a local peddlar. Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) has about as many social skills as the dead fish he sells from door to door. They are the oddest of pairings, her sweet, hopeful and funny, him sullen and grey, living in the strangest of houses: a tiny, one up one down structure perched on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.

Walsh, working from a screenplay by Sherry White, wisely does not rush the development of a relationship between the two. Nor does she sugar-coat it, with Hawke’s character veering into brutish territory several times. Slowly, the surface tension and misery is chipped away, with small victories for Maud here and there adding up to a life-transforming whole. Among these victories is the selling of a painting to holidaying New Yorker and art aficionado (Kari Matchett).

Walsh has a background in television work, which presumably helped while working in the doll-like confines of the Lewis house, but she looks equally in her element when filling the big screen with the landscapes of Newfoundland and Ireland (here standing in for Nova Scotia).

With those natural born movie star looks of his, Hawke has a tough time trying to look like a fish peddlar, but he puts in a heroic effort. Hawkins needs a yin to her yang, a sky to her sea, and in the Before Sunrise and Training Day actor she finds a hugely generous one, happy to sit back and let her dominate proceedings.

As for Hawkins, it is hard to think of an actress better suited to playing the bird-like but lionhearted Lewis. Her portrait of the artist is a catalogue of intelligently wrought miniatures, determinedly unshowy and best observed in close up. While her talents are hardly news to directors such as Woody Allen (Blue Jasmine) or Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky) it is always a treat, as here, to see them given free rein.