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
