One Good Film: "What Maisie Knew"

A sharp-eyed update of a Henry James novel with a resilient little girl at its center.

I’m inaugurating a semi-regular feature today for paid subscribers – maybe a regular feature; we’ll see how it goes. I’ll start the week off with a recommendation of a reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you can go from there: Watch it that night, that week, over the weekend, never. Or keep a list on your refrigerator and cross them off as you go. I’ve been looking back over my two decades as film critic for The Boston Globe – over 3,000 reviews, give or take – and am struck once again by how much good stuff is out there on demand that didn’t get the release it deserved or was well-received but is in danger of being forgotten or that was well-received and sank without a ripple. Some of the suggestions will be entertainments, others will be tougher meat, but my job, really, is to remind you they exist. You’re on your own after that.

“What Maisie Knew” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – A modern-dress adaptation of a 1897 Henry James novel, told entirely from the point of view of a 6-year-old girl (the remarkable Onata Aprile) as she watches her parents’ relationship come apart. The setting is New York’s SoHo, which the gifted directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“The Deep End,” “Bee Season”) paint as an enchanted forest of sunlight and sidewalks. Here be monsters: Maisie’s mother, Susanna (Julianne Moore) is a neurotic rock star past her prime, and her father, Beale (Steve Coogan), is a well-spoken British art dealer with the gift of shirking responsibility. (Can you imagine two worse parents than Moore and Coogan, or at least the characters these actors tend to play? Neither can I.) After the two split and pair up with others, Beale with Maisie’s former nanny (Joanna Vanderham) and Susanna with an easygoing bartender (Alexander Skarsgård), we come to see that the newcomers have the innate gift of kindness the girl’s mother and father lack, and you wonder, as the filmmakers do, why terrible parents can't simply be fired. The film flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the kid has probably earned it. “What Maisie Knew” is about the erosion of innocence in the midst of plenty, and if it doesn’t follow the title character into adolescence, as James did, it catalogues the many insults, small and large, against Maisie’s faith in the adult world. Yet the film rarely feels heavy-handed, so serene is its own faith in its dreamy young heroine’s strength. (2012, , streaming on Peacock and Kanopy, for rent on YouTube and Apple TV)

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