Getting to Know “What Maisie Knew”

Several of the great novels of Henry James (1843-1916) have been made into films of the Merchant-Ivory variety. Such James works as Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, all of them marked by psychological insight and a fascination with upper-crust life, have successfully been brought to the big screen, filling the eye with bustles and parasols and cravats. (There’s also a terrifically spooky period film, The Innocents, that came out in 1961, based on James’ The Turn of the Screw. I saw it in its first release, and have never quite gotten over it.)

 James’ plots don’t usually translate well to the present day. Certainly, his characters don’t talk in the way we do now, for better or for worse. But in 2012 a cluster of producers brought forth a film that had been languishing in development hell since 1995. It’s a modern adaptation of a slim James novel in which the author chronicled the impact of a divorce upon a six-year-old girl. Although the novel, What Maisie Knew, was published back in 1897, its story of warring parents, their new mates, and an emotionally challenged child seems astonishingly contemporary.

 The film shifts its action from Victorian London to modern New York City, where Susanna and Beale have acrimoniously parted. Susanna, a successful singer/songwriter with a big tour coming up, is highly volatile. (She’s played by the always impressive Julianne Moore, whose participation helped get this project off the ground.) Beale, played by Steve Coogan, is an art dealer with an international clientele: he’s jolly indeed when he’s in a good mood, but spends most of his life jetting to foreign climes. Six-year-old Maisie (the truly adorable Onata Aprile) rotates between their condos, cheerfully adapting to wherever she happens to be. Her poise when a pizza deliveryman shows up at her dad’s place—as the grown-ups fight, she calmly gathers enough dough for an appropriate tip—tells us that in many ways she’s old before her time.

 Beale, it seems, is now shacking up with Maisie’s former nanny, Margo, whom he soon marries. On the rebound, we gather, Susanna ties the knot with a virile young bartender, Lincoln. Maisie, always open to sudden changes in her chaotic family life, quickly comes to adore Lincoln. That’s a good thing, because her mother is soon off in a big tour bus and her father departs yet again for Europe, leaving Margo and Lincoln to manage the child’s daily life.  Everyone loves Maisie, and she loves all of them, but her daily needs are not being considered. At one point she’s stranded at Lincoln’s bar, not sure where she’s going to sleep that night. (A moment in her first-grade classroom tells us that she’s not the only child of her generation and affluent circumstances dealing with a fractured family life.)  

 I’m not always a fan of tykes on the screen: too often they seem mannered and excessively “cute.” But this project, built on Maisie’s reactions to the world going on around her, is lucky to have found a child who genuinely seems both innocent and wise beyond her years. We sense her craving for love, and feel like cheering when she finally takes a stand on her own behalf. The ending is not quite that of Henry James, but it will do nicely. (The young actress, now 20, is still around, but without any recent credits I know of. The implications in her bio is that her own parents have separated too. Perhaps that’s why this performance seems so close to the bone.)

 

 

 

The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

Peering at “The Woman in the Window”

It’s  sometimes comforting, at a time of extreme tension, to return to the past. Maybe that’s why I decided to turn off the news reports coming out of Minneapolis and watch a movie from 1944, The Woman in the Window. This Edward G. Robinson starrer, which I’ve heard described as helping to launch the “film noir” genre, is a taut little thriller also starring Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea. The director is the great Austria-born Expressionist Fritz Lang, whose credits include Metropolis and M, along with (after he came to America) such noir classics as Scarlet Street and Clash by Night.

 One thing that’s refreshing about watching old movies is that we all know the tropes. If a mild-mannered college professor is first seen lecturing his students about the ambiguity of the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not kill,” we know for certain that someone’s going to die. If a husband stays behind in the city when his wife and kiddies leave for a family vacation, it’s a good bet that he’ll soon have unexpected company. And if he admires a woman’s sultry portrait in a shop window, there’s an excellent chance that said woman will come into his life in a major way. Moreover, those of us with any knowledge about the studios’ adherence to the so-called Hayes Code in this era are quite clear on the fact that any on-screen moral transgression is eventually going to be punished.

 The marvelously versatile Robinson, who had over a hundred acting credits in roles ranging from good guy to bad guy, from leading man to supporting player, has been called the best actor who was never nominated for an Academy Award. (The Academy belatedly granted him an honorary Oscar in 1973, just after his death at age 79). In “The Woman in the Window,” he’s not without complexity. Though a committed family man, he proclaims to his cronies, over drinks at the local club, that life shouldn’t end at forty. He speaks out for the male need to assert oneself, though he ruefully admits that  too often “the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak.” In other words, in the absence of his (rather bland) wife and kids, he’s ripe for an adventure. When the mysterious artist’s model (a stylish Bennett) invites him first to a cocktail lounge and then to her apartment, he’s ready for anything. (Her come-on is that she wants to show him the artist’s sketches that preceded the painting of the portrait he so admires.)

 We don’t know quite what to make of Bennett’s character, nor of the intruder who changes everything. But an escalating series of events leaves Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley taking charge of hiding a body. This is made even trickier because one of his close pals,  played by the imposing Raymond Massey, is a district attorney who loves talking about the details of his latest big case, and even invites Wanley along to see where the body was found by law enforcement. Uh oh!

  Suspense definitely mounts. But perhaps we have a hunch where all this is going. The film’s trailer, very much in the style of that hyperbolic era, breathlessly promises “the most startling ending ever filmed.” True, the conclusion is well handled by all involved, but I must admit that I wasn’t truly surprised. I had guessed the secret outcome of this film just ten minutes in. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to go on a journey even when you anticipate its outcome. Better by far than being hit by terrible surprises every time we turn on the news. 

 

On the Couch with "Sentimental Value"

For months I wanted to watch Sentimental Value, the Norwegian family drama (by auteur Joachim Trier) that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has just been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Though recently more and more foreign-language films have been nominated for top Oscar honors, this film’s haul has been particularly impressive, including Best Original Screenplay and four acting noms (for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress, for both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas as Best Supporting Actress, and for screen veteran Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor). Among the kudos already won by Sentimental Value is recognition from AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups, which has its own unique categories for films of special interest to older folk. AARP named Sentimental Value the year’s “Best Intergenerational  Film.”

It’s easy to see why Seniors who appreciate art-films might go for this one. No guns, no spilled guts, no things that go bump in the night, unless you’re talking about painful memories. Just a quiet family drama, involving two grown daughters, their estranged father, and several others caught in the orbit of a Norwegian household whose members are prominent in the European arts community. I have loved many Scandinavian films over the years, starting with the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, and I suspected Sentimental Value would be a pleasant change from recent highly lauded but deliberately over-the-top American flicks like Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Here’s what surprised me: when I watched on the big-screen TV in my living room, Sentimental Value seemed almost too low-key. Its characters’ struggles to bind old wounds struck me as  convincing, but not always interesting. I wanted something exciting to happen, beyond talky scenes in various quiet locales—a bedroom, a café, a beach. The low-key conversations did contrast in an interesting way with the theatricality built into the subject matter. The father is a world-famous director; his #1 daughter Nora is an acclaimed stage actress. At the start of the film, it’s opening night at a huge and prestigious theatre, and Nora (dressed in a period gown that suggests she’s playing an Ibsen heroine) is in a state of total panic. She’s absolutely convinced that she can’t possibly play her role, and she does everything she can think of—to the consternation of cast and crew—to avoid going on stage. Then, finally, she does make her entrance . . . and the performance is a triumph.

So we know Nora is a self-centered neurotic, but it remains to meet the rest of the family, This occurs after the funeral of Nora’s mother, when friends and relatives gather at the historic family homestead. An unexpected arrival is Nora and her sister’s estranged father, who long ago left the family behind to pursue his directing ambitions. Now he’s back, at least partly to further the new project with which he hopes to revitalize his career. The script he’s written focuses on the final days of his own mother, who had been an heroic anti-Nazi partisan in World War II. He wans to film in the family home, and he wants Nora to step into his mother’s role. By the film’s end, we understand everyone’s emotional connections, and see the possibility of reconciliation. But it takes a long time to get there, and I confess I was a bit confused by the off-screen characters (a mother, a grandmother) who are so much responsible for these family members’ deeply-felt emotions.

I wonder: would I have liked this film better in the cineplex? Do certain quiet, serious movies just not work as couch-films? 

 

Once in a Blue Moon (Richard Linklater tries something completely new)

Filmmaker Richard Linklater was born and raised in Texas, so perhaps it makes sense to call him a maverick. A listing of his more than twenty films reveals how widely he has roamed, artistically, and how eager he is to try on new subjects and new styles. Early films like Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) explore the aimlessness of Texas youth culture. Two years later Linklater was in Paris, shooting Before Sunrise, the first of three romantic meditations on love and time. (The others are 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight; all three films feature Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.) 

 While directing amiable studio comedies like School of Rock and Bad News Bears, Linklater was also writing and shooting the remarkable Boyhood. Filmed at intervals between 2002 and 2013, Boyhood is the close-to-the-bone story of a young Texas boy who grows from age 6 to 18, learning to cope with life in the face of his parents’ divorce. (Hawke plays young Mason’s father, and Patricia Arquette won an Oscar for portraying his mother.) Continuing his interest in the passage of time, Linklater is currently working on a cinematic version of Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s play moves in reverse chronological order, with characters starting out as middle-aged cynics and moving backward to their college years, when they were young and idealistic. Linklater’s idea was to start by filming youthful performers in the play’s later scenes and keep at it intermittently until (approximately) 2040, when the actors would match the age of their characters’ older selves.

 All of this, of course, involves a lot of lag time, as Linklater waits for his lead actors—Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein—to be affected by the passage of time. Meanwhile, though, Linklater has found other ways to pump up his creative juices. Remarkably, he released two major films in 2025, both of them very much interested in exploring what it takes to be an artist.

 Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, was clearly made for a specialized audience, those cinéastes who are keen on the heady period known as the French New Wave. The film (shot in black & white, almost entirely en français) re-creates the dynamic period—circa 1960—when bright young French film critics like François Truffaut and Agnès Varda were making the move into becoming directors. The focus here is on the capricious Jean-Luc Godard, shooting on the streets of Paris an eccentric gangster thriller that seems to break every rule of standard filmmaking. It’s fun to peek behind the scenes of À bout de souffle (better known to most of us as Breathless), a film that every serious film buff knows practically by heart. I was most impressed with Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoe Deutsch impersonating Jean Seberg, a refugee from Hollywood not at all sure what she thinks about Godard’s guerrilla brand of filmmaking. 

 Last year Linklater also released Blue Moon, a biographical drama set almost entirely in New York’s famous Sardi’s. That’s where the great Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart has gone after ducking out on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner Richard Rogers with newcomer Oscar Hammerstein II. A drunk and a self-hating homosexual, Hart tries to soothe his bruised ego with liquor, flirtation with a pretty co-ed, and delusions of future grandeur.  We know, though, that he’s very near the end of his road. Though Ethan Hawke hardly shares Hart’s looks and tiny frame, his is a masterful and fascinating performance as a man who talks (and talks) to silence the pain within. 

 

A Star Has Died: Carmen de Lavallade (1931-2025)

 To my surprise, there’s been no mention of the passing of dancer Carmen de Lavallade in my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Carmen died, in the waning days of 2025, in a New Jersey hospital, and east coast news outlets paid her glowing tributes. But I’m still shocked that her death, at age 94, was apparently ignored in L.A. After all, Carmen was born in Los Angeles, and—as a teenager—began her serious dance training after winning a scholarship to Lester Horton’s landmark Dance Theater in West Hollywood. Quickly becoming a star of the Horton troupe, she took on such fiercely dramatic roles as Salomé, while also teaching small kids like me the basics of modern dance.

                                                     Me at age 4, with my beloved teacher  

 Still in her early twenties, Carmen set out for the Big Apple, along with her close friend, future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Both soon found work in a 1954 Broadway production of House of Flowers, a fanciful Haiti-set musical that was an unlikely collaboration between Truman Capote and Harold Arlen. It was there that Carmen met and married Trinidad-born Geoffrey Holder, who later triumphed on Broadway with The Wiz: he would win Tonys both for directing the show and for contributing its lively costume design.     

 Now based in New York, Carmen continued on as a dancer, featured in Ailey’s American Dance Theater productions and guesting with other companies. Eventually she began teaching stage movement at the celebrated Yale School of Drama, where a young Meryl Streep was one of her students. When Carmen and I met for lunch in New York ten years ago (see photo above from that memorable afternoon) she reminisced about appearing in the premiere production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, imaginatively staged in the Yale swimming pool.

 Blessed with a beautiful face and a long slim body, Carmen was undeniably well-suited to movies too. This began back in her Lester Horton days, when she was cast in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones, the Broadway hit that adapted Bizet’s Carmen to an African-American cast. If  you watch one of the big musical numbers, set in a local bar during World War II,  you’ll see a young Carmen, her long pony-tail swinging as she dances exuberantly to “Beat Out the Rhythm of the Drum.”  In 1959, she revealed her acting chops in a tense scene from a crime drama, Odds Against Tomorrow, wherein she played the tough-minded girlfriend of star Harry Belafonte. Almost forty years later, she was featured in John Sayles’ Texas drama, Lone Star.

 In the course of a long career, Carmen received many accolades, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2017. But I can’t help remembering a story my parents told me when I was a kid. In the 1950s, Carmem was appearing with two male dancers as an opening act for Pearl Bailey at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and my folks drove from L.A. to see her perform. Carmen’s name blazed forth on the marquee, and she danced nightly in an opulent show room for appreciative crowds. But Carmen was not allowed to lodge at the Flamingo. Her café au lait coloring meant she was stuck all day in a stuffy motel room, without access to the swimming pool and other amenities that made the Flamingo a world-class resort. So my parents gave up fun in the sun to spend their weekend keeping her company. When they got home, they told me all about it. It made no sense to me then . . .  and it still doesn’t. But I learned once more that the world outside of Lester Horton’s Dance Theater was not always a graceful place.

 

Facing Up to “No Other Choice”

Korean auteurs seem to have a special talent for black comedy. Frankly, I have no idea why. My weeklong visit to Seoul in 1967 revealed to me a country on the move, but one that (unlike Japan) had not yet adapted to modern technology. (I stayed in a middle-class household where the kitchen was dominated not by a refrigerator but by a huge jar of kimchee.)  

 That, of course, was long ago, and South Korea has now caught up with technology in a big way. In fact, I’ve heard that Seoul’s international airport is one of the marvels of today. Maybe it’s the rapid evolution of Korean society from third-world to first-world, as well as the current Korean domination of pop culture (see, for instance, the global fortunes of KPop Demon Hunters) that has caused thoughtful Korean filmmakers to look askance at what their world has become. Hence the success of such landmark Korean films as Bong Jun Ho’s darkly funny Okja and Parasite, the latter of which was, in 2020, the first-ever foreign language film to take home the Oscar for Best Picture.

 Bong Jun Ho is not the only South Korean writer/director to enjoy an international reputation. His countryman Park Chan-wook has also had major arthouse hits. These include the very violent, very twisty Oldboy, as well as The Handmaiden, an erotic thriller that won a standing ovation at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.  Bong’s latest, which was in the mix for several film festival awards, is No Other Choice, based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, The Ax. This has now become a Seoul-set black comedy about a world in which social and technological change are happening much too fast. (Sounds familiar, no?)

In No Other Choice, the nebbishy Man-su (Lee Byung-Hun) is a middle-aged husband and father devoted to his middle-management career in the paper industry. (Why does any mention of paper remind me of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in the Steve Carell sitcom, The Office?)  At the outset, he clearly knows he has everything he could wish for: a beautiful wife, a fabulous hillside home, talented (though psychologically troubled) kids, a sense of real personal satisfaction. But then his company, Solar Paper, is sold, and the Americans move in, replacing veteran workers with hyper-efficient machines. While his family continues to live as if nothing has changed, Man-su struggles to find work. I suspect that in today’s economy we can all identify, but Man-su’s solution is not for everyone. Methodically studying the top candidates for the industry job for which he is best qualified, he decides to bump them off, one by one. But while he might be a highly capable mid-level guy in the paper industry, he makes a terrible assassin. The film’s comedy, such as it is, involves Man-su desperately trying to get rid of the competition by any means necessary. He generally succeeds—the film definitely has its gruesome moments—but his best-laid plans often go awry in ways that not everyone might find funny.

It’s all very frenetic, with occasional detours into sex comedy involving (among others) Man-su’s pretty wife and the dentist who is her boss, and to me something seemed off about the film’s pacing. A black comedy is at its best when it all happens so quickly that we don’t have time to ask questions, but No Other Choice is 139 minutes long. Of course there’s an ironic ending. This was a film I wanted to like more than I did. By the end, I was mostly waiting to be put—like Man-su’s victims—out of my misery.