What Maisie Knew
Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Writer: Nancy Doyne, Carroll Cartwright
Based on: Henry James‘ novel
Cast: Onata Aprile, Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, Alexander Skarsgard, Joanna Vanderham

Plot:
Maisie (Onata Aprile) lives with her mother Susanna (Julianne Moore), an aging rock singer and her father Beale (Steve Coogan), a workaholic business man. While Margo (Joanna Vanderham) watches Maisie most of the time, Susanna and Beale are separating, their divorce growing increasingly uglier. When Beale marries Margo, Susanna tries to keep up by marrying Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard). Through all of that, it is Maisie though who gets almost lost.

What Maisie knew is a pretty damn wonderful film. It’s sweet and touching and has a perfect cast. More movies should be like it.

The film firmly sticks with Maisie and Maisie’s point of view. It’s not easy to pull that off, to work with insinuations and to depend that the viewers will be able to make sense of the story despite only getting parts and chunks of it.

It doesn’t always work perfectly. Especially the way Margo’s and Lincoln’s relationship develops was handled a little hamfistedly and was telegraphed from too far away. But it didn’t really matter – the story still worked.

The cast was pitch-perfect. I was really impressed by Onata Aprile. And it was good to be reminded that Alexander Skarsgard knows how to act not-arrogant not-soldiers/warriors as well (it was also fascinating how he changed his whole body language to show just that. He was basically rolled into himself, but his attempts to look smaller just made him more hulking). I could watch Julianne Moore for hours and ages anyway.

The resolution of the story, though, was a little flimsy. If you think about it for a little, you will realize that there are about a billion (legal) problems that weren’t addressed. I can imagine that that came from the book the film is based on – much of these issues wouldn’t have been issues at the time. Which I’m definitely curious to read to see how it was handled then. But fortunately it wasn’t too much to sour the film for me.

Summarizing: loved it.