BRIGSBY BEAR: AN UNLIKELY SAVIOR

If you missed the movingly sweet indie film “Brigsby Bear,” you are not alone. My theater cancelled their scheduled weekend showings after a negligible audience for its opening Friday, though they did allow it a 4:00 p.m. showing the following Monday and Wednesday afternoons before sending it on its way.

That’s a real shame because Kyle Mooney (who also stars) and Kevin Costello’s screenplay, directed by Dave McCary, is one of the most charming little gems to come along in a while. Mooney and McCary, along with Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford, came together in 2007 to form the sketch comedy group, Good Neighbor, and since 2013, Mooney has been a cast member of “Saturday Night Live” where McCary works as a segment director. That sounds like a lot of extraneous information, but if it isn’t clear to you as you watch just what a labor of friendship and ensemble work “Brigsby Bear” is, the filmmakers make it clear in the credits, where, in addition to a cast and crew who wore multiple hats, a slew of “Utah Volunteers” are thanked for their contributions.

The premise of “Brigsby Bear” is, on its surface, a grim one. James was abducted as an infant, and has lived his 20-something years in an underground bunker with his abductor parents, Ted and April Mitchum (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams). Throughout his life, each week like clockwork, a new episode of a children’s show called “Brigsby Bear” arrives on video cassette.

“Brigsby Bear” the film risks comparisons with Peter Weir’s 1998 “The Truman Show” but the films differ in important respects. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has been abducted by a faceless corporation. James’s abductors, despite the heinousness of their crime, obviously dote on their ward. Whereas Truman is the unwitting star of 24-7 reality show for an audience of voyeurs, “Brigsby Bear” the show is initially an educational tool for James, ala Sesame Street, with episodes designed to teach math or spelling or geography or good manners. While “The Truman Show” is about a kind of soul-sucking corporate cynicism, not a single frame of “Brigsby Bear” betrays an air of world-weariness or disenchantment.

As James has grown over the years, so “Brigsby Bear” the show and its iconography and mythological narrative have grown, too, becoming more nuanced and complex. Its plot twists have evolved and its secret vocabulary has flourished. James can recite by heart the almost 1,000 episodes better than the most hardcore “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fan. His room is a shrine to Brigsby with every variety of fandom collateral possible. Aside from the Mitchum’s, whom he will later describe as pretty boring, James’s reality – imaginary and literal – is the universe of “Brigsby Bear.”

One night, James puts on his gas mask – to protect from an atmosphere he has been taught is toxic – so he can sneak out and sit on top of the bunker entrance. As he gazes out at the imaginary creatures with which Ted has populated the bunker entrance, a fleet of police cars comes racing toward him lights flashing lights, sirens screaming -- sights and sounds he has never before seen nor heard. Suddenly, he is abducted back into the real world.

Mooney plays James as an arrested, overly excitable ten-year-old, at times seemingly somewhere on the autism spectrum. A sensitive Detective Vogel (Greg Kinnear) tries to explain the circumstances to the bewildered James. When James is united with his birth parents, Greg and Louise Pope (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins), they try to create something like normalcy, but as well-meaning as those efforts are, they can sometimes seem downright cruel through James’s eyes. To complicate things further, Greg and Louise have a daughter (Ryan Simpkins) – a teenager resentful at losing standing as an only child and embarrassed by a weirdo who talks about nothing but an imaginary character while day after day donning a Brigsby T-shirt.

Just as it begins to seem to Greg and Louise – as it does to us – that the attempt to integrate James – despite everyone’s best efforts and James’s intrinsic good nature – is not going to turn out well, we sense that James is taking in more than the adults are giving him credit for and something happens. First, Greg takes James to a movie, the first time he has ever seen anything projected on the big screen. Second, sister Aubrey grudgingly lets James tag along to a party she’s going to with a girlfriend. Their friend Spence (an endearing Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is there and is the first person to genuinely and intuitively engage with James. After seeing the movie, James had asked his father, who is the person who makes movies? His father explains that many people make movies, not just one. For James the answer is revelatory. If lots of people make movies, he can make a movie, and when it turns out Spence is an amateur filmmaker of sorts, James sets out to continue the story of Brigsby Bear.

Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Spence and Kyle Mooney as James in "Brigsby Bear"

“Brigsby Bear” is more than a self-reflexive movie, more than a movie about making a movie. It is more than paean to the magic of movies. It is a hymn to the transcendent power of creativity, especially that pure creative energy of childhood imagination. Brigsby Bear’s nemesis is a huge sun, a sun that looks like nothing so much as the pioneering filmmaker George Méliès’s iconic Man in the Moon in his 1902 “A Trip to the Moon” – we might call him the Man in the Sun, though in the Brigsby world he is Sun Snatcher. Brigsby, looking like a cross between a teddy bear and a 1960s astronaut, does not himself possess super powers – excepting his kindness, bravery and wisdom – but the objects he wields have special properties, and the saga of Brigsby and his world rivals the creations of a J. R. R. Tolkien or J. K. Rowling.

This pitiable attempt at a synopsis falls completely flat in the face of a film that is an unbridled celebration of creation, collaboration, friendship, love and forgiveness. Quite simply, “Brigsby Bear” is the tale of an unworldly young man come to earth who offers the possibility of redemption to all who open their hearts to him. Yes, this little treasure didn’t make it to the multiplex, but if the DVD is released in time, put enough by to stuff every stocking on your holiday list.


In theaters in limited release.
No official release date yet for DVD and/or Blu-ray. Based on the average time between opening day and home entertainment releases, Movie Insider’s unofficial estimate is around December 2017.





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LETHAL LADIES STEP OUT AND STEP UP

“Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.” Elvis Presley

If there are antidotes to Charlottesville, one may be “Step,” the new documentary from Amanda Lipitz that won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 2017 AFI Docs festival. The film tells the remarkable story of the step team at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSYW). The school opened its doors to sixth graders in 2009. In the spring of 2016, its inaugural class was preparing to graduate.

 “Step” follows three young women as they train on the step team, known as the Lethal Ladies, with the goal of winning an extramural competition, and as they pursue their academic studies with the goal of securing college acceptance. The former objective is led by dedicated coaches, the latter by the stalwart support of the Upper School Principal and the commitment of one of the school’s counselors, Paula Dofat.

“Step” focuses on Blessin Giraldo, whose mother suffers almost crippling depression; Cori Grainger, the class valedictorian whose mother has recently remarried; and Tayla Solomon, who struggles with her grades even as her demanding corrections officer mother acts not only as her daughter’s booster, but the entire step teams’.  All of the girls’ parents appear to be genuinely loving, but in the face of students whose academic struggles are exacerbated by precarious economic circumstances, the complexities of the college applications process, and the seemingly insurmountable challenge of financial aid, it is the school’s principal, coaches and counselors who emerge as the heroes of the story.

Their indefatigable efforts on the girls’ behalf can seem herculean at times. They refuse excuses and self-pity yet show unlimited depths of compassion and tough love to see their charges through to BLSYW’s mission: that each and every graduate will win college admission, a goal this inaugural BLSYW graduating class has attained. A commencement speaker reminds them that this achievement is not shared by most schools in the United States.

Blessin, despite being the step team’s original organizer, is the most challenged by the demands of discipline, both on the team and in the classroom. Ms. Dofat, speaking to admissions representatives from a bridge school program on Blessin’s behalf, becomes visibly emotional and apologizes. “I’m sorry,” she says wiping away tears. “This is so unprofessional.” One can’t blame her – so much of her professional life and emotional being are wrapped up in the lives and potential of the girls.

“Step” could be faulted for coming off as a feel-good documentary, but there is always an open spot in my heart for documentaries and based-on-a-true-story accounts about the power of education and the arts to shape young people for the good. Indeed, as a life-long educator, it has been my experience that when we raise the bar and demand excellence, not all but most young people rise to the challenge. 

In “The Great Debaters” (2007) Denzel Washington resurrected the story of Melvin B. Tolson who led the debate team of the historically black Wiley College to victory in the 1930s. Katie Dellamoggiore’s 2012 “Brooklyn Castle” trained its lens on Intermediate School 318, an inner-city public school in Brooklyn, New York, where an after-school chess program produced the top junior high school chess team in the country and the first middle school team to win the United States Chess Federation's national high school championship.

Two 2015 films focused on schools with predominantly Latino students. For champions of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) model that is being so forcefully advanced these days, Sean McNamara’s uplifting “Spare Parts” is a dramatic film based on Oscar Vasquez, the Carl Hayden High School teacher who steered the engineering club in Phoenix, Arizona, to win first place over M.I.T. in the 2004 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center remotely operated vehicle competition. For champions of sport, Niki Caro’s “McFarland, USA” is also a dramatic film based on McFarland High School Coach Jim White and the Latino cross country team he created from scratch and trained to win the 1987 California state championship.

My favorites are documentaries that focus on the arts, like “Step” and Amy Sewell’s 2005 “Mad Hot Ballroom” about a ballroom dance program in the New York City public school system for fifth graders in the Tribeca, Bensonhurst and Washington Heights neighborhoods that culminates in a city-wide competition.

The Baltimore Leadership School was established in partnership with Baltimore City Public Schools, and all of these examples demonstrate the equalizing – and transformative – effects public education can have when its possibilities are embraced by bold teachers and students committed to something larger than themselves. As we face the demolition of public education in the United States, films like these are powerful reminders of what it is we are in the process of giving up.

“Step”

In select theaters

On DVD and Blu-Ray December 2017

A GHOST STORY: A MEDITATION ON TIME, REMEMBRANCE AND LOSS

What is time but loss? Loss of youth, of companionship. The process of becoming and of declining. David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” is about time and loss and opens with an epigram, the first line of Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House”: “Whatever hour you woke up there was another door shutting.” Woolf’s story might better be described as a prose poem. At 1,949 words, it does not tell a story as much as sketch an atmosphere, and you – the reader, the necessary reader of the tale – are set within the narrative from that first sentence. Then, “From room to room they went…a ghostly couple.”

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself …. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?”

Narrator and reader blur, and “us” (“But it wasn’t that you woke us.”), the narrator and her husband we are to assume, cohabit with the ghostly couple in their house, ghosts who “seek their joy,” “the Treasure” buried in the room – a treasure, we quickly realize, that is not any material thing but the memory and the love they made together in the house “hundreds of years ago.”

Casey Affleck as C. Photo Credit: Bret Curry. Courtesy of A24

Like “A Haunted House,” “A Ghost Story” is and is not a ghost story and like Woolf's tale, is ultimately a love story. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play M and C, a couple living in a house somewhere. He wants to stay because he feels a sense of the history they have together there. She wants to move, and his unwillingness to discuss their future weighs on their relationship. Then he dies in an auto accident and is on a table in a morgue. The camera frames the viewing room and his body under the sheet, until, after she sees him for the final time and departs, he rises slowly from the table. The camera sits, not for seconds but for minutes.

Lowery renders the ghost, not as ectoplasm or vortex or translucent dismembered head, but reduced to a child’s Halloween costume – a mere sheet with cutouts for the eyes. The sheeted ghost is fitting for a deceptively simple plot: A man dies and his ghost has nowhere to go but home. In fact, the austerity of Lowery’s cinematic effects contributes, like Woolf’s elusive syntax and carefully measured vocabulary, to a narrative arc that moves from lyrical to symphonic in a mere 92 minutes. Lowery employs ghost story tropes – tracking shots down empty hallways; a creaking door; buzzing, flickering lights; an unexpected crash or two – but nothing that might cause fright.

The cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo has an almost monochromatic feel in the interior shots, but when the story ventures out of doors, the landscapes are rich and vast. Lowery asked that Daniel Hart’s haunting original score draw inspiration from Woolf’s story, and the concluding piece “Safe, Safe, Safe” echoes the sibilance and the comfort that the line imparts to Woolf’s tale. Again and again, the score incorporates the Picardy third – raising the third of an expected minor triad by a semitone to create a major triad resolution. This produces an effect of joyousness when our expectation is melancholy. Not surprisingly, then, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” will figure into the thematic concerns of the film, as well.

“A Ghost Story” is structured in juxtapositions of montage sequences and static shots. In the era of the fast-cut, Lowery is not afraid for the camera to do nothing but record. An establishing medium long shot becomes the static point of view for an entire scene. Not only does this challenge our conventional contemporary movie-going experience, the approach imposes the experience of time on us. For many, movies are a means of escape, and escapism is to be distracted from the experience of time. That terrible, almost tragic, expression about killing time expresses a desire to kill something so dearly precious and limited to each of us. Lowery seeks, instead, to intensify the experience of time, and then, by contrast, move us through a series of montages that communicate the passage of days, then years, then centuries.

It is impossible not to see in Lowery’s atmospheric visual style and melancholic lyricism an unmistakable homage to Terrence Malick. Some critics argued this made his 2013 feature debut “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” which he also wrote and directed and which also stars Mara and Affleck, merely derivative and uninspired, but there was something brewing in it that augered more. In “A Ghost Story,” Lowery has rendered a transporting meditation on time and human experience, and though Malik’s influence is evident, Lowery explores similar thematic elements with an elegant economy of emotion and duration in stark contrast to Malik’s excesses witnessed in all their grandeur in the 2011, intensely autobiographical “Tree of Life.”

Beginning with Malick in the 1970s, a certain subset of directors emerged from Texas – including Julian Schnabel and Richard Linklater – a subset that Lowery with “A Ghost Story” may be destined to join. Malick was born in Illinois in 1943 but attended St. Stephen’s Episcopal boarding school in Austin, Texas, and most of his films exude a sense isolation experienced in the soft light of the Texas Plains. Brooklyn-born (1951) transplant to Brownsville, Texas, the New York-based painter Julian Schnabel’s 2007 “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a profound meditation on the capacity of loss to heighten experience and on the mind’s ability to make time non-linear. His new cinematic project “At Eternity’s Gate,” about Vincent Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) and his time in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, Schnabel describes as “…a film about painting and a painter, and their relationship to infinity.”

Richard Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, in 1960, and the Linklater films that interest me most are those that take on issues of time and our place in it: the animated “Waking Life” (2001), which questions the nature of reality, consciousness, free will and existence itself; the “Before” trilogy filmed over the course of 18 years – “Before Sunrise” (1995), “Before Sunset” (2004), and “Before Midnight” (2013); and the logical – though radical – extension of the trilogy concept, 2014’s “Boyhood” filmed over the course  of 11 years. This approach – the examination of time through real time – is Linklater’s signature method, and one wonders where it might take him next.

The 36-year-old Lowery hails from Texas, too. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the family moved to Irving, Texas when Lowery was seven. Whether as an effect of the landscape of the southernmost region of the Great Plains, the proximity to the Atlantic Gulf or the sheer size of the state, Malick, Schnabel, Linklater – and now Lowery – share an interest in our experience of time – the fact that we are trapped in it while possessed of the inventiveness, if not to transcend it, at least to reimagine it. Taking very different approaches, each director contemplates the existential experience of time and its companion, loss.

Eternity is both tragic and majestically mysterious. Not long after our ghost has returned to his house, he goes to a window that looks out onto the window of the house next door where he sees a similarly sheeted ghost inside. The two ghosts exchange wordless hellos, understanding each other telepathically. The neighbor ghost explains that she’s waiting for someone. Our ghost asks, “Who?” “I don’t remember,” she replies.

Casey Affleck as C. Photo Credit: Bret Curry. Courtesy of A24

In the conclusion to his review of “A Ghost Story” for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane describes the point after the two now empty, decrepit houses are bulldozed as “the saddest detail of all”: The two ghosts stand amidst their respective rubble, and the neighbor ghost says (whom I refer to above as “she”), “‘I don’t think they’re coming.’ At this precise instant, he folds—just crumples and drops, leaving nothing but a wrinkled sheet on the ground. The waiting was all he had. I must have watched special effects worth hundreds of millions of dollars this year, but nothing has rent the heart as much as this plain low-budget collapse, and it makes you wonder: Was that a soul in Purgatory, and is he now at peace? Or do the dead themselves pass on, living here until their hopeless cause expires, and dying thus around us every day?”

I agree with Lane about the intensity of this moment sans any CGI ostentation, but I did not find it altogether sad. Rather, I read this scene as one of hope. Neither that some greater force condemns us to a Purgatory from which we are released after a designated time nor that we die a second literal kind of death. Might there be hope in choice, in our own agency to give ourselves up to a cycle that is universal and eternal?

In an early scene, M explains to C that, as she has moved from house to house through life, she leaves a tiny note hidden in each – something it is in our human nature to do – leave a piece of ourselves behind, something that says “I was here.” This theme, the desire to leave our mark, circles through “A Ghost Story,” and in that regard, the film is also a story about art – and what is art but an expression of love. Perhaps it is only great artists who leave a mark with any meaningful impact, but we all make some gesture, even if it’s just a tiny slip of paper that carries our handwriting pushed into a crack in the woodwork by which we hope to be remembered. Yet in time, even memory will be lost. We will no longer remember those we’ve loved and lost. But time will go inexorably on – in its grandeur and its indifference.

“A Ghost Story”

In select theaters.

DVD, Blu-ray, Netflix and Redbox release date October 3, 2017.

MAUDIE: A FOLK PAINTER INSPIRES A POIGNANT LOVE STORY

Though there are many good biopics and films based-on-a-true-story (and many bad ones), I have long maintained that it is almost impossible to make a great one. Some have transcended. Alan Pakula’s  1976 “All the President’s Men,” David Lynch’s 1980 “Elephant Man,” Mike Nichols’s 1983 “Silkwood,” Milos Foreman’s 1984 “Amadeus,” Jim Sheridan’s 1989 “My Left Foot,” Martin Scorsese’s 1990 “GoodFellas,” Roman Polanski’s 2002 “The Pianist,” Terry George’s 2004 “Hotel Rwanda,” Sean Penn’s 2007 “Into the Wild,” Julian Schnabel's 2007 "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Danny Boyle’s 2010 “127 Hours” come to mind. Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit,” which opened last week, is another. Considering the glut of based-on-a-true-story films these days, however, the chance that one will stand out in the crowd is rare.

The problem is one of artistic license, which writers (take Shakespeare’s history plays, examples par excellence) and filmmakers used to have until 1989, the year Oliver Stone was slammed for “Born on the Fourth of July.” The film initially met with a warm critical reception, but Diana West’s 1990 article for The Washington Times, “Does ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ Lie?,” was typical of the ensuing onslaught. Based on the autobiography by Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone, “Born on the Fourth of July” encountered a barrage of criticism for everything from collapsing multiple characters into one or inventing characters altogether to outright falsifying the record. More recently, Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” (2014) faced similar reproofs. “Selma” confronted a further challenge in that, since it was not based on autobiography, the personal story had to be conjectured while the overarching historical narrative was expected to be accurate.

Since 1990, film makers have deployed variously worded disclaimers to avoid a torrent of accusations of inaccuracy. Closing credits end with statements along the lines of: "This story is based on actual events. Some incidents, characters and timelines have been altered for dramatic purposes. Certain characters may be composites or fictitious."

Sally Hawkins as Maud Lewis in "Maudie"

Of the protagonists in the films singled out above, none is a personality with whom we share an intimate, albeit public, familiarity. The better we know the public figure, the more iconic the personality, the more artistic license becomes proportionally constrained. Franklin Schaffer’s 1970 “Patton,” Michael Apted’s 1980 “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (Loretta Lynn), Richard Attenborough’s 1982 “Gandhi,” Julie Taymor’s 2002 “Frida” (Frida Kahlo), Taylor Hackford’s 2004 “Ray” (Ray Charles), Bennett Miller’s 2004 “Capote,” James Mangold’s 2005 “Walk the Line (Johnny Cash), Olivier Dahan’s 2007 “La Vie en Rose” (Edith Piaf), Gus Van Sant’s 2008 “Milk” (Harvey Milk), Steven Spielberg’s 2012 “Lincoln,” James Marsh’s “The Theory of Everything” (Stephen Hawking), Danny Boyle’s 2015 “Steve Jobs” – superior films all and each received – deserved – critical acclaim. One wonders, however, to what degree one’s own and the critics’ enthusiasms are based primarily on the degree to which the starring performers pass as the actual historic personage. Honestly, have you ever seen a satisfactory portrayal of JFK? (Todd Haynes’s 2007 “I’m Not There,” in which Bob Dylan is portrayed by a myriad of actors and actresses, is a notable – and admirably creative – exception to this rule.)

All that by way of introduction to Aisling Walsh’s film “Maudie.” The Irish director is best known in Britain for her BAFTA TV Award-nominated work on the two-part miniseries adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Man Booker Prize-nominated novel “Fingersmith” (available on Netflix DVD), also starring Sally Hawkins.

Though based-on-a-true-story, “Maudie” follows the largely imagined life of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis. The bare bones of Maud’s story are just that – bare. Born in 1903 to John and Agnes Dowley in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Maud was diagnosed early on with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Her mother taught her to draw Christmas cards to sell. John died in 1935, Agnes in 1937. When her brother sold the family house, Maud was sent to live with her aunt in nearby Digby. There she met Everett Lewis, an itinerant fishmonger whom she married shortly thereafter in 1938. He bought Maud her first artist’s brushes and paint. They reportedly shared a devoted relationship, living in Everett’s nine by ten and a half foot house in Marshalltown, from which Maud sold paintings that gained notoriety in the 1960s. She died in 1970; Everett lived until 1979.

Sherry White wrote the screenplay for "Maudie," and in an interview for the Halifax Chronicle Herald (February 26, 2015) says she “became frustrated when [Maud’s] story seemed like a biopic.” White explains that “[I]t was feeling like a movie of the week. Eventually, I focused on the love story…. …. I wanted to believe it was a love story and they were two outsiders who found each other.” Walsh and White benefited from a dearth of biographical information, detail that might otherwise shackle their narrative. They were free to construct a story for Maud and Everett to inhabit as characters, and they took full advantage of dramatic license to create a compelling narrative with a rich backstory for Maud that informs the middle-aged character we meet onscreen. White wanted Maud to be a “character who is determined to have a life of her own, determined to find happiness despite the fact life is challenging for her and beats her down. She’s infectious in how she sees [the positive in] the world….”

Sally Hawkins plays Maud, Ethan Hawke plays Everett and, as the film dictates, they should be understood as characters – not as literal incarnations of actual people. Much of the power of Hawkins’s performance derives from the fact that she refuses to play Maud as a naïf. Maud is quiet yet headstrong, demurring yet shrewd. She has had the misfortune to grow up with a physical infirmity that others have misattributed as intellectually deficiency. The screenplay depicts Everett as an illiterate loner, and Hawke rises to the challenge of maintaining a coarse, churlish exterior while revealing a man capable – albeit cautiously and despite an occasional sadistic outburst – of devotion and genuine affection.

Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins as Everett and Maud Lewis in "Maudie"

Ever the keen observer, when it becomes apparent to her that Everett does not always keep track of his fish deliveries, Maud offers a system for keeping track without suggesting any failing on Everett’s part. In response to Everett’s reluctance to marry (an attitude apparently not shared by the real-life Everett), Maud signs her paintings “Maud Lewis” well before they tie the knot. She persists, and in his own way, he does, too.

White says, “You don’t normally see love stories about characters who are not the typical beautiful people.” This is so true, especially of American cinema, and one of the reasons foreign films are often so refreshing, absent as they sometimes are of overly pretty people. It took an Irish director, a Canadian writer, an English actress, and an American actor to shape in “Maudie,” not an eccentric caricature, but an indelible portrait of endurance and generosity of spirit.

In selected theaters.

Home Entertainment Unofficial Release Dates:

Digital/On Demand (VOD) September 2017

DVD/Blu-Ray October 2017