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.