Sally Hawkins, who has delivered no shortage of remarkable performances in Happy-Go-Lucky, Blue Jasmine, and more, is back this year with a new biopic. Aisling Walsh‘s Maudie, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival last fall, captures the life of Maud Lewis, a Canadian folk artist who suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Also starring Ethan Hawke, the film depicts their tumultuous relationship amidst Maud’s creativity, and today brings the first trailer, fittingly hailing from Canada, where it’ll be released in April, a few months prior to its U.S. debut.
We said in our review, “The committed relationship the two undertook stands at the heart of Maudie. Hawkins further proves her range, portraying Lewis as a shy, slouched, but talented woman that almost never looks at anyone in the eyes, her head always down. Hawke is miscast as Everett in a role that demands a tough aggressiveness, but the actor renders it a little too sweetly. In one particular scene, Lewis slaps Maudie in the face after she embarrasses him in front of one of his clients. A couple of minutes later, he agrees to marry her and pushes his bride in a carriage down the Nova Scotia fields with a melancholic face.”
See the trailer and poster below.
MAUDIE, based on a true story, is an unlikely romance in which the reclusive Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) hires a fragile yet determined woman named Maudie (Sally Hawkins) to be his housekeeper. Maudie, bright-eyed but hunched with crippled hands, yearns to be independent, to live away from her protective family and she also yearns, passionately, to create art. Unexpectedly, Everett finds himself falling in love. MAUDIE charts Everett’s efforts to protect himself from being hurt, Maudie’s deep and abiding love for this difficult man and her surprising rise to fame as a folk painter.
Maudie hits theaters in Canada on April 14 and in the U.S. on June 16.