I didn’t expect much from this movie, but it turned out to be a moving and heartbreaking story about a young girl caught up in a middle of a nasty break-up.
You end up watching a movie for all sorts of reasons, and I picked What Maisie Knew mainly for its short and sweet ninety minute runtime, an ideal length I wanted late at night before going to bed. With most films these days extending past two hours, it’s refreshing to watch a movie that doesn’t outstay its welcome.
I had no idea that the film had lofty literary origins, and is in fact a contemporary adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel about the divorce of two abominably narcissistic people and the effect it has on their daughter. In this version, we follow the perspective of six-year-old Maisie (Onata Aprile), a quiet, sensitive and watchful child growing up in Manhattan and struggling to make sense of the adults around her. Her mother Susanna (Julianne Moore) is a hot-tempered rock star past her prime, constantly engaged in vicious arguments with Maisie’s father Beale (Steve Coogan), an art dealer permanently glued to his phone. Their relationship is clearly in tatters, but the real battle begins once the couple separate.
Susanna and Beale are not complete monsters, and there are brief moments when they seem to be aware and ashamed of their self-absorbed nature. They are however either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. In between random and extravagant displays of affection, Maisie’s parents either use her to get back at each other, or treat her as an inconvenience to be handed off into the care of someone, anyone who’ll have her.
It is Maisie’s great luck that the people willing to step into the parenting vacuum are good souls. Her Scottish nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham) ends up marrying her father and finds out that she’s as disposable to him as his own daughter, but her affection for Maisie is real. Susanna meanwhile retaliates by quickly marrying a hunky, much younger bartender Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard). Though neither Maisie nor the viewer trust him at first, he develops a natural and genuine bond with her, which irks Susanna to no end. Skarsgard has always been fantastic at playing stone-cold sociopaths with no soul, but this role draws out sweetness and innocence from him, even if Lincoln is clueless about what he’s supposed to be doing half the time.
As great as the supporting cast is, the film works chiefly because of its young star and the restrained approach the filmmakers take with Maisie’s character. The camera will often switch to a child’s perspective, closer to the ground with the adults’ bodies and heads cut off by the frame. Onata Aprile’s performance is astonishingly naturalistic, to the point where it barely feels like acting at all. Maisie is not a precocious “movie child”; most of the time the film simply follows her as she quietly observes the world, without articulating her feelings and experiences out loud. She suffers in silence, as children often do in real life, without tantrums and one single tear running down her cheek in the entire film.
The movie does cross into a rosy-tinted area in its final third, with some developments feeling a tad far-fetched, but by that point I was so invested in Maisie’s well-being that I didn’t mind the hopeful conclusion. It still leaves difficult, unanswered questions about Maisie’s future, and what lasting damage her parents’ selfish behaviour will cause.
P.S. I love Julianne Moore and she’s great as brittle, high-strung and narcissistic Susanna, but I’m not sure if I bought her as a rock star, maybe because she seems too closely based on Alison Mosshart from The Kills, a true badass female rock star. Moore even belts out one of The Kills songs during the movie and I’m sorry to say that the comparison doesn’t do her favours.
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