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.)

 

 

 

May December : The Crashing of Symbols

The old song says it: “It’s a long, long while from May to December.” As a film about the consequences of long-ago horrific behavior, May December sounds more interesting than it is. As a Todd Haynes project featuring two of Hollywood’s boldest actresses, May December is most surprising in that it’s a male character  (and a relative Hollywood newcomer) who largely captures our attention. The premise is intriguing: an older woman (Julianne Moore) once shocked the nation with a series of horrific acts, which involved a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy, whom she later (following a jail term and the birth of a baby while incarcerated) married. Into her small-town domestic life, some two decades after all this sturm und drang, comes an ambitious young actress (Natalie Portman) who’s planning to star in an indie film in which she portrays the female half of the mismatched couple.

  I came into the film curious to see how the two women would evolve, and how one might influence the other. I’m leaving aside here the question of how a radiant performer like Moore could (at 63, though her character must be slightly younger) represent December. In the film, she’s—from start to finish—a happy housewife, doting on her three kids and her hunky (much younger) husband. Any doubts she might have about the unbalanced nature of her marriage to a 36-year-old seem non-existent, from start to finish. The result: I didn’t much enjoy watching her onscreen. It’s only near the very end, when she says something about her troubled older child from a previous marriage that may or may not be true, that I started to wonder if there was more to her character than a placid, rather addled, acceptance of the status quo.

 I had wondered, too, if this film might be an exploration of merging identities, somewhat in the way that Bibi Andersson’s and Liv Ullmann’s characters seem to coalesce in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona. This may be the filmmakers’ goal, but I mostly remember Portman wandering around Moore’s small town, taking notes as she unearths character nuggets from Moore’s screen family and friends. Though, as a buttinsky, she’s treated with a surprising amount of courtesy by everyone she meets, there’s an air of Hollywood fakery about her. This seems confirmed when—late in the film—she turns a moment of compassion into something different, something definitely predatory. And then, at the film’s conclusion, we see her in character, playing Moore’s Gracie in a way that seems to undercut our previous sense that she’s on Gracie’s side.

 Writing this, I realize that the film sounds quite provocative. But it’s also infernally slow, scored with doleful music and missing any real spark of life. Both female leads lacked appeal for me; the only character for whom I felt compassion was the young husband (the critically praised Charles Melton), trapped in a domesticity that doesn’t match up with his biological stage in life. He’s the one who has, appropriately, garnered most of the film’s awards this season, for delineating the awkward tension between his character’s role as pater familias and a  young man’s restless wish to explore the wider world. Still, his hobby of tending the cocoons of monarch butterflies is so obviously meant to be symbolic of his own personal needs that it quickly becomes irksome.

 The story of May December is clearly based on the long-ago case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her much-underage paramour, Vili Fualaau. An L.A, Times columnist notes that Fualaau, still alive at 41, wishes the world would stay away from his tricky story. 

 

Thoughts from After “After the Wedding”

 

The Tony Awards, celebrating the best of an up-and-down Broadway season, gave 5 statuettes to a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company that flips the gender of key roles, turning Bobby into Bobbie and transforming Amy, the reluctant bride, into Jamie, a reluctant (gay) groom. The switch, made with Sondheim’s blessing and participation, adds new dimension to a show that originally debuted in 1970. I’ve discovered that something of the same switcheroo happened in 2019 when a Danish Oscar nominee from 2006 was turned into an American family drama, written and directed by Bart Freundlich. Because Freundlich has long been married to  actress Julianne Moore, it was perhaps natural for him to find a way to star his talented spouse in this project. But it’s also true that the gender switch seems to have enriched the story, perhaps making a sappy situation a bit more interesting.

 A caveat: I never saw the Danish original, in which a man (the talented Mads Mikkelsen)  returns to his home nation from an orphanage he’s founded in India, only to discover himself face to face with the now-grown child he left behind, as well as the adoptive father who has a secret reason for courting his friendship. Perhaps if I’d watched this much-admired movie, I would have been indignant about the way the story was changed for American audiences. But, knowing nothing of the Danish plot, I completely accepted the fact that an ethereal but ultimately strong young American woman (beautifully played by Michelle Williams) would give up the baby she bore as a teenager, then find spiritual joy in nurturing a passel of orphans in far-off Tamil Nadu. It’s a slow-moving drama, and so there’s a good half hour before she meets with Julianne Moore, the hard-charging New York executive who may be on the verge of giving her orphanage major funding and who surprises her with a last-minute invitation to her daughter Grace’s lavish nuptials.

 It's at that wedding that the pieces start coming together. When Isabel, the visitor from India, first sees Oscar (Billy Crudup), the father of the bride, she realizes – as do we -- that he’s her long-ago love, the one who had agreed with her on putting their newborn up for adoption. But the twists, artfully prepared for, keep on coming. As the fragile young bride, Grace, deals with the fact that the mother she thought had died long ago is suddenly here in the flesh, Moore’s character is keeping some secrets of her own.

 A man skipping out on a pregnancy, as in the Danish version, is of course not NEW news. I was intrigued by how Michelle Williams’ performance makes it credible that a woman would relinquish a baby, and then reveal burgeoning—though complex—maternal feeling both toward her Indian orphans and her own adult child. And Moore’s turn as a tough-minded, all-hands-on-deck CEO (one married to a gentle, artistic man) may seem at first like a feminist caricature, but we ultimately discover she has unexpected depths. I also want to give a shout-out to the young woman playing the third crucial female role, that of the barely adult daughter who loves her parents and her new husband, but has probably married much too soon. Abby Quinn is a new name to me, but she’s one to watch. (She also sings, and co-stars in what’s been called a country-music horror film, Torn Hearts, released just weeks ago.)

 In a world where men’s stories seem to predominate, both on stage and on screen, it’s refreshing to see women get a chance to shine.