The ease with which Henry James? Victorian-era satire What Maisie Knew translates to its 21st century setting in Scott McGehee and David Siegel?s very loose adaptation of the novel should be met with some uneasiness. We have traveled through more than a century of democratizing social fervor, and have arrived in a remarkably similar era, one in which the upper crusts outsource parental obligations and the struggling underclasses, who take on the burden for financial reasons, but end up shaping the lives of the heirs of the one percent.
There will be some who see this film and wonder why Julianne Moore?s character, Susanna, a manic, middle-aged rock star, and her husband Beale (Steve Coogan), a solipsistic, self-absorbed busy businessman, ever decided to have little Maisie in the first place. As far as the film is concerned, however, that?s a moot question. Maisie has been made, she exists, and so in what way should the social circumstances into which she has been born in to bend to her needs? The film takes up residence squarely in Maisie?s perspective, opening with a series of scenes that spy bitter parental arguments from around the corners of the family?s white-walled, modernistic multi-storied New York flat, and continuing to shoot with a camera that is often perched at her eye level. The questions of What Maisie Knew are entirely Maisie?s, and the central question is the most unsettling: what is love, and who loves me?
The divorce is inevitable, after all Beale is sleeping with the beautiful young Scottish nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham). The ink is still wet on the divorce papers when Susanna picks up a hunky bartender half her age, Lincoln (Alexander Skarsg?rd), whom she marries. Amidst this chaotic family situation, scenes range from excruciating depictions of neglect, as when the loud music and noise from one of Susanna?s parties keeps up Maisie and her friend who is sleeping over, prompting a middle-of-the-night pick-up by the friend?s father; to the comic, like when Skarsg?rd?s Lincoln stumbles into Maisie?s school to pick-up the little girl, introduces himself to her, and then tries to explain to the school principal that he is her stepfather even though she?s only met him once before.
Gradually Beale and Susanna drift to the periphery of the picture. Beale has business to take care of in London, and he eventual ponders moving back to his native land altogether. With Maisie? Maybe, but, no, that won?t work. Susanne has a tour coming up, and with Beale away, it becomes increasingly difficult to find someone to pick up the slack on the childrearing. Lincoln is conveniently useful in this regard, but even as he begins to forge a tender relationship with the child, Susanna intervenes to defend her parental territory. Julianne Moore?s desperate portrayal of Susanna is what injects the film with its overwhelming sense of dread. At the heart of her character there is something like love, but she is tossed about and fractured by her own self piteous angst.
The nanny Margo also becomes a confidant for the young Maisie, and when Beale marries her, she seems a suitable stepmother. But no sooner is the ring on the finger than Margo is reduced to just another piece of overlooked furniture in Beale?s distracted life. The three outcasts ? Lincoln, Margo, and Maisie ? end up improvising their own family unit, and a trip on the Long Island Rail Road out to a rental home on the shores of the Great South Bay sets the stage of a retreat from the onslaught of their respective oppressive loves. In these scenes, and particularly the film?s final moments, we find resolution to the impossibility of Maisie?s circumstance in the fleeting glow of a lyric moment, which finds in the rarity of familial normalcy an attribute of life lived simply, in common and with self-giving love.
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