Old Yorker

  • What Maisie Knew

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott McGehee and David Siegel (2012)

    The first, most obvious thing that strikes you about an updating of Henry James’s novel to the twenty-first century is that the circumstances of Maisie Beale, whose parents have broken up, are much less unusual than they were at the time What Maisie Knew first appeared in print (1897).   (It’s amusing, though, that the child’s name hasn’t had to be changed:  Maisie is fashionable again within the social group that the movie describes.)  The first question in your mind is whether the co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, working from a screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, will try to replicate James’s narrative:  I’ve not read the novel but it’s famous for telling the story from the point of view of the young title character.  In the early scenes, Maisie’s situation – being moved to and fro between rampantly self-centred parents competing for sole custody of the child – seems uniquely unenviable.  This is most striking (and hard to believe) in the sequences set at Maisie’s school.  You feel she must have classmates from broken marriages or partnerships:  there’s a rather perfunctory recognition of this midway through the film – when Maisie introduces ‘my new stepfather’ to her class and a little boy puts up his hand to say that he has ‘two stepfathers … but one of them’s nearly dead’.   As for the narrative structure, the viewer doesn’t really experience events through, or even with, Maisie – beautifully though Onata Aprile (who was seven when the film was shot) plays her.  You observe and you know what’s happening without Maisie telling you – in fact, you’re likely to be at least one step ahead of her.

    Yet What Maisie Knew is entertaining and has strengths which, although they may be to some extent happy accidents, are undeniable.   In the novel both parents remarry but Maisie (by now an adolescent) chooses eventually to live instead with her former governess, the frumpish but devoted Mrs Wix.  This character is a fleeting cameo (from Paddy Croft) in the film and Mrs Wix’s aged, forbidding appearance make her an improbable choice for a duenna in present day New York, even allowing for the fact that Maisie’s mother Susanna (Julianne Moore) has recently discovered that the child’s attractive young former nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), is having an affair with Maisie’s father, Beale (Steve Coogan), and is about to become his wife.  At the end of the film, Maisie is living (although for how long isn’t made clear) with Margo and Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgård), the bartender whom Susanna marries tit-for-tat.  The continuing negligence of Susanna and Beale – whose careers as, respectively, a superannuated rock singer and a purely mercenary art dealer take precedence in their lives – means that their new spouses meet up more than they expected.  Maisie’s parents are never there to collect or hand over the little girl when they should – Margo and Lincoln have to sort things out and, as their relationships with Susanna and Beale quickly fall apart, they realise that they like each other.  In one sense, Maisie’s ending up with Margo and Lincoln seems implausibly sentimental.  The outcome makes sense on a satirical level, though:  because Margo and Lincoln have become part of domestic arrangements, why wouldn’t self-serving Susanna make use of them to allow her declining career to struggle on for a bit longer as she tours the country?  (Beale, by this point, has already headed back to England and pretty well out of his daughter’s life.).   The happy ending also works thanks to the impact of the actors playing Margo and Lincoln: Joanna Vanderham and Alexander Skarsgard are not just blonde-haired – they come to seem golden and to embody ideal parents.  The characterisation of Susanna and Beale is crude but it makes them parents from hell:  the movie thus suggests almost a reversal of fairy-tale conventions.  The biological parents are the villains and the step-parents are the heroine’s redeemers.

    Susanna is played by Julianne Moore of whom I’ve rarely been a fan, Beale by Steve Coogan, whom I can hardly bear to watch on screen.  I wondered at the end how different What Maisie Knew would be to someone better disposed to these two – their admirers will, I guess, relish the crucifying gusto of their portraits of enraging shits.  I expect too that plenty of people will like this film because it allows them self-righteously to deplore the behaviour of Maisie’s parents, even though Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright load the dice against them by giving the pair egomaniacal ways of earning a living, and the means to shower their child with presents instead of real affection.  To be fair to Julianne Moore, she gives more depth to Susanna’s neurotic self-centredness than the script supplies and makes this cartoon egocentric less garish than it might otherwise be.  (Moore’s inherent lack of vitality, which has made some of her most admired performances draggy – in The End of the Affair, Far from Heaven and The Hours – probably helps here.)  Steve Coogan is a different matter.  I was all ready for him to draw on his (own?) nasty, smart-aleck quality to make Beale convincing but he’s such a vain performer that he still manages to be inauthentic.   There’s a moment – just a couple of lines in a conversation between Beale and Maisie – when Coogan seems to be listening to the other actor in the scene instead of playing to the camera.   Otherwise, he’s so thoroughly false it’s unnerving.   Onata Aprile is already an experienced child actress but McGehee and Siegel have directed her very skilfully so that her playing is both natural and precise.   She has a sober quality that makes Maisie seem older than her years (and her mother); Aprile’s slenderness increases Maisie’s vulnerability and contrasts with an unstressed resilience of spirit.  Maisie has got used to a horrible home life:  when a schoolfriend, Zoe (Sadie Rae Lee), comes for a sleepover, she’s traumatised by the bewildering crowd and noise of the party that Susanna’s throwing.  Maisie dutifully reports to her mother that ‘Zoe’s crying’ but you see that she’s inured to this herself.

    It’s during this sequence that we first and briefly see Alexander Skarsgård’s Lincoln.  The next time he appears, it’s to collect Maisie from school because Susanna has to be somewhere else:  Lincoln explains that he’s now married to Susanna, although he’s never seen Maisie since the party.  It’s a cliché but Alexander Skarsgård lights up the screen throughout this film; he radiates warmth and humour and you completely understand how he transforms the child’s life.   (‘You really like him, don’t you?’ asks Margo at one point.  ‘I love him!’ replies Maisie.)   Skarsgård’s prominent front teeth give him a hint of goofiness, his good looks a dash of humour.  His scenes with Onata Aprile are delightfully easy and funny:  Lincoln is both a dream father and a big brother to Maisie.  Skarsgård’s American accent sounded good to me – there are just a couple of moments when you can hear the rhythms of Scandinavian English (and at one point Lincoln says to Maisie ‘What are you making?’ and you think the line in the script was probably ‘What are you drawing?’).  When Maisie has to spend the evening with Lincoln at the chi-chi bar where he works (and where Susanna presumably picked him up), Skarsgård achieves a beautiful blend of embarrassment and solicitude – while the child is entranced.  (The scene is a vivd illustration of something that’s always fascinated me:  how a waiter is both subservient and in charge.  This is the only scene in which Lincoln, nearly always seen in a T-shirt and jeans, is, relatively, dressed up.)  There’s an unhappy counterpoint to this appealing sequence when, later on, Maisie arrives at the bar on an evening Lincoln isn’t working there.  I didn’t care for Joanna Vanderham in Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge on television earlier this year but she’s lovely as Margo:  uneasy and tentative in her interactions with Maisie at first but blooming as their mutual trust, and Margo’s feelings for Lincoln, grow.  Vanderham speaks in what I assume to be her native Scottish accent and more expressively than in Dancing on the Edge.  Her gradually increasing charm complements the immediate impact of Skarsgård’s; it’s wonderfully sustained in both cases.   The film’s unobtrusively pleasant score is by Nick Urata.

    25 August 2013

  • Fish Tank

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrea Arnold (2009)

    When a film is set on an Essex council estate and a white horse appears, chained up on a patch of waste ground, it’s a safe bet that horse will be symbolic.  Twice, in the early stages of Andrea Arnold’s new film, the protagonist, Mia, tries unsuccessfully to free this horse; near the end of the picture, she learns from her would-be boyfriend Kyle that the animal is dead:  ‘She got sick and had to be shot … she was sixteen – she’d had her time’.  It’s not just the appearance of the aging mare that evokes They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  The only possible way out of Great Depression poverty for the characters in the Horace McCoy novel (and the screen adaptation, directed by Sydney Pollack) is success in a marathon dance contest.  In Fish Tank, Mia – who’s fifteen going on sixteen (the same age as the horse and with, it seems, little more future) – wants to be a hip-hop dancer.  When she sees a notice ‘Female Dancers Wanted’, she sends in an audition tape.  That eventually comes to nothing but, as she prepares to leave home at the end of the film, Mia, her mother Joanne and younger sister Tyler – who’ve done nothing but abuse each other up to this point – have a brief moment of unity:  they start to move together to ‘Life’s a Bitch’ by Nas.  The title promises a study of claustrophobia but the ichthyoid metaphor is both too limiting and rather clashes with one of the most startling moments in the film – when Joanne’s latest boyfriend, Connor, takes her and her daughters for a drive, catches a live fish in a lake and sticks a cane down its gullet to kill it.  The creature would have been safer in an aquarium than it was in fresh water.  Perhaps Andrea Arnold should have called the picture ‘Vivarium’ – ‘A place, especially an indoor enclosure, for keeping and raising living animals and plants under natural conditions for observation or research’ (according to freedictionary.com).

    There was a lot to like about Arnold’s first feature Red Road – and so a lot to look forward to in what she did next.  Fish Tank, although compelling and well acted, is a bit of a disappointment.   Arnold examines her characters’ lives – which are grim, except for the odd moment of hedonistic relief – minutely and, in terms of their routine details and structure, believably but her field of vision is narrow.  There are resonant images – of the sexually awakening Mia glimpsing things through half-open doors or steamed up windows, of trees and skies beyond the blocks of flats, of a heart-shaped balloon flying above them at great speed (the final shot).  But there’s not enough texture to the film to prevent these images from sticking out as strategically placed visual highlights.  The same is true of key bits like that concluding dance of the mother and her daughters:  it seems artificially imposed and its point is too explicit.   There’s nothing surprising in the story and it feels too easy to justify that on the grounds that Mia’s social circumstances mean that her life is predetermined.

    Although Arnold is praised for her unflinching realism, it’s striking that, as in Red Road, she eventually pulls back from the bleak conclusion towards which her story seems to be heading.    When Connor has had sex with Mia and promptly walked out on Joanne, Mia goes on foot to his home in Tilbury; he opens the door then urgently gets her off the premises and drives her back to the local train station.  When Mia goes back a second time, no one answers the door.  Compared with her own home, it’s a decent house with a back garden and Mia breaks in from the back.  Once she’s inside, her discovery – from scarves and jewellery, toys, photographs – that Connor has a wife and a daughter capsizes Mia’s desire for him, both as a lover and a father.  She urinates on the carpet.  When the family returns home, Mia exits the way that she entered, lies in wait for Connor’s child, Keira, and abducts her.   There’s a distressing cross-country chase – Mia’s being upset by Keira’s angry resistance is almost as upsetting as the child’s bewilderment and alarm – which ends on the edge of estuary waters and with Keira falling in and disappearing from view.  This is as far as Arnold is prepared to go.  We know from the earlier sequence at the lake that Mia can’t swim but she is usefully carrying a tree branch which she now uses to get Keira out of the water.  She then returns the child home.

    Mia’s escape to Cardiff with Kyle at the end of Fish Tank is less unconvincing than the phony upbeat resolution that marred Red Road but, considering how little happens in this new film (the plot is simpler than that of Red Road), Arnold’s screenplay is often awkward and evasive.  The character of Kyle is introduced very clumsily.  When Mia tries to break their horse’s chain, Kyle and his elder brother physically threaten her.  From that point onwards, Kyle becomes a nice, harmless boy and the brother conveniently disappears from the scene.  There’s no attempt to explain what Connor’s wife thinks he’s doing during the time he’s living at Joanne’s.   When Keira is back home and Mia is leaving the scene of her crime, Connor drives after her, then chases her across a field, then belts her and then drives off.   As an illustration of his complete rejection of her, the moment is dramatically effective; yet, while we can see that Connor, for reasons of self-protection, might not pursue with the police the break-in at his home and his child’s disappearance, it’s incredible that his wife would turn an equally blind eye and that he can draw a line under what’s happened.  It comes as a surprise that, the day after the abduction, Mia goes ahead with attending the dance audition to which she’s been called.  As soon as we see what kind of performance the people hiring dancers are after, it becomes hard to credit that Mia would have got a call on the basis of the tape she sent in.  You could believe she might have turned up and left once she saw the other auditions and the way the girls were (un)dressed.  It makes no sense, except as a dramatic flourish, that she gets up on stage, has her performance track (‘California Dreamin’ by Bobby Womack) start, and then walk outs.

    In the main role, Katie Jarvis is very good – even though she’s distinctive in a way that makes it obvious from the start that Mia is a cut above her surroundings and other girls on the estate (and a bit puzzling that no one there seems to think she’s anything to look at).  In the course of the film, Jarvis ages convincingly – emotionally and physically (Arnold dresses and photographs her so that the budding breasts become more noticeable).   I’ve not yet seen Hunger and Michael Fassbender isn’t much more than an amusingly clipped English accent in Inglourious Basterds but he’s impressive here:  as soon as he appears, he manages to suggest a man with a life elsewhere.  Connor is very aware of his good looks and flirts blatantly with Mia before he eventually has sex with her.  She’s fascinated by him whether she sees him wearing only his boxer shorts or looking smart in his work clothes (he’s a security guard at Wickes in Barking).   There’s considerable tension in the exchanges between them:  you know that the man is exploiting the child; at the same time, you can feel that what she is experiencing with Connor is providing Mia with sensual excitement that’s new and confusing but also life-enhancing.  Kierston Wareing is excellent as Joanne:  as Mia gets older, her mother – living for drinking and lovemaking with Connor and devastated when he walks out – becomes more helplessly childish.  And Arnold strikes gold with the two youngest performers:  Rebecca Griffiths is completely convincing as Mia’s kid sister Tyler – who’s already developed a necessary (brittle) shell of foul-mouthed aggressiveness; in the smaller role of Keira, Sydney Mary Nash has a really expressive blend of fear and wilful toughness.  Harry Treadaway does better than might reasonably be expected with the weak role of Kyle.  The family’s Staffordshire bull terrier – the well-named Tennents – makes a strong showing too.

    20 September 2009

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