Performances more impressive than engaging

With her simple, sunny images of rural Nova Scotian life, the Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis left the world a brighter place than she found it. This drably earnest rendering of her life story doesn’t follow suit.

Aisling Walsh’s film traces Lewis’s rise over three decades to unlikely international prominence, even as personal and medical problems keep mounting up.

Though stricken with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, she painted almost until her last breath in 1970 at the age of 67: first watercolour greetings cards, which she sold for 25 cents apiece from her husband’s fish barrow, then later in oils on hardboard and over the walls and furniture of the couple’s spartan coastal hut.

Sally Hawkins plays Lewis, and Ethan Hawke her husband Everett, a roundly unpleasant fish peddler whom she first takes up with as a live-in housekeeper, before the pair marry some weeks later.

Even in Lewis’s younger days (the story opens in her early thirties), Hawkins plays her with an utterly convincing sparrow-like fragility that makes you tense up whenever she’s around sharp corners. As her arthritis worsens and emphysema digs in, the actress’s body crumples a little further in on itself with every passing scene.

But even taking into account Maud’s generally valiant spirit, which carries a trace of the Teflon bonhomie of Hawkins’s star-making role in Mike Leigh’s Happy-go-lucky, her performance is more impressive than engaging – and the same goes for Hawke, whose hard work in making Everett good screen company without planing off his flaws and complications only takes him, and the film, so far.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift. RC