I'd look for it absently in book stores, never finding it, never worrying too much about that fact. Then for some reason, in the past year, I became more interested in converting on this desire, even though it's been since 2019 that I've seen the movie, when I was reviewing contenders for my best of the last decade. (It finished 18th.) Back in February I found it at a book store in Carlton, and snapped it up.
The other thing reading What Maisie Knew would give me is it would allow me to stick to my plan of making every second book I read relate to cinema. This is not exactly what I had in mind when I set out to do that, but it worked for the exercise because it would allow me to compare and contrast a modern-day adaptation of a classic novel with the novel itself. Which I did as soon as I finished reading the novel on Tuesday, getting my reward by watching the movie for the fourth time that very night.
Little did I know how different the book would be, and how much I ultimately didn't care for it.
I suppose this is my tried-and-true philosophy in action again, where I always say you like the first version of a thing you come across the best, even if someone could argue that the second version is "objectively" better -- if it means anything at all to talk about objectivity when it comes to taste. But James' original novel, which was printed over a number of weeks and months as a serial in the New Review, is quite a different, quite a bleaker view on these events and characters. Having loved the far more humanist view on them, it's not what I was expecting or hoping.
I hope you've seen What Maisie Knew by now, but I will include a SPOILER ALERT because I'm sure there are quite a few of you who haven't.
To synopsize the movie first, it's the story of the titular young girl, who would appear to be about six or seven, and who is the daughter of a warring unmarried couple who are both successful -- or, have historically been -- in the arts. Onata Aprile plays that young girl. Her mother is Susanna (Julianne Moore), an aging rock star who is still successful enough to be involved in a new album and a new tour. Her father is Beale -- the one character who keeps his name from the novel -- and is played by Steve Coogan. He's an art dealer. They are separated by the things that usually separate people, particularly successful people, and each takes up with a new partner in order to help their position in the custody battle over Maisie. Beale marries Maisie's nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), in part because she's very pretty and in part because he imagines that Maisie's already close relationship to Margo will benefit him in any custody argument. As a fast and desperate reaction, Susanna marries Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard), a bartender in her circle of friends and hangers on, even though it's unclear how well she really knows him and whether he has any experience looking after young children. He'll get a lot more really quickly, as Maisie's parents' neglectful ways leave them in the hands of these stepparents way too often, frequently without properly ensuring their availability, and in violation of their own custody responsibilities. Margo and Lincoln, who are both good to their core, develop a relationship with one another and create, effectively, a surrogate family that does not involve either of Maisie's original biological parents.
And that's a happy ending. The last shot of the film is Maisie running down a dock toward a boat, this boat ride having been something she'd been anticipating for a couple days, with a huge smile plastered across her face. Aprile is astonishing in this movie and I'm sorry her career petered out by her mid-teens after only a handful of other roles.
The book has no interest in this happy ending.
The book, of course, was the only version of the story that existed for more than a hundred years. Actually there was a 1968 TV series and a 58-minute film in 1975, and a French TV movie in 1993. But I have to assume that these all stick more or less to James' novel. And until Scott McGehee and David Siegel interpreted the material in 2013, from a script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, it had likely always ended in disappointment for Maisie.
First my general impression of the book.
Although this is a book with a lot of clever language, the kind that occasionally gives you an exact and exquisite appreciation of the author's meaning, it feels quite a bit like a hundred pages of story in a 275-page book. The rest is description that is baroque enough in its construction that I frequently gave up the effort of trying to make out exactly what was being conveyed in any individual sentence. I'm no dummy, mind you -- I was an English major in college and have read all sorts of classic literature, much of it with relish. This, though, I found to be a bit of a slog, which is why it took me more than two months to read it.
One thing that frequently makes it difficult to discern everything James is saying is that he refers to characters in euphemisms, like "their friend" rather than a character's name. The stepfather, too, has a bad habit of referring to Maisie, somewhat ironically I suppose, with phrases like "my good man" and "old boy." (I noticed the movie plays lightly on this. There's one scene where Lincoln calls Maisie a "wise guy," and when he protests that she's a girl, he changes it to "wise girl.")
The bigger disappointment with James' novel, though, is where it ultimately lands.
To spoil the novel also, the larger narrative gestures are the same as presented by McGehee, Siegel, Doyne and Cartwright, only taking place in turn-of-the-century England and (a small bit) France rather than in New York City. And the Margo and Lincoln characters, there called Sir Claude and Miss Overmore, do appear to end up with each other, despite a lot more fighting and a lot less certainty. They just don't end up with Maisie.
That's right, at the end of James' What Maisie Knew, Maisie goes off with her governess, Miss Wix.
Miss Wix is meant to be a bit of a ridiculous character, an older woman who is quite proper and has an especial fascination with/fixation on Sir Claude. To give you an idea of how I imagined her in my head, though, I had her looking like Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz. Which is not a very good sign of her promise as someone Maisie should end up with.
Why does Maisie go with Miss Wix at the end? Well, even though she loves Sir Claude and seems to be okay with Miss Overmore as well, she doesn't celebrate their potential union, their ability to become a new makeshift family free from either of the biological parents, who are even worse in the novel than they are in the movie. (The kinder portrayal of these two in the film is consistent with the collective humanism on display.) Instead, she asks Sir Claude to give Miss Overmore up. Unlike in the film, she comes across as potentially a lot less worthy than he is -- that's 1897 for you -- so we don't necessarily blame Maisie for making her choice. But when Miss Wix -- who, you remember, is prim and proper, as well as stuck on Sir Claude -- can't sanction the union, she actually takes Maisie off with her, and the stepparents let them go. The implication is that Maisie doesn't object to this because she thinks this relationship will end up the same way her parents' relationship ended up.
Huh?
The Miss Wix character, who is perhaps even more significant than either of the absent parents in the novel, does have a corollary in Siegel and McGehee's film. And here she is indeed a replacement for when Beale poaches the nanny to make her his wife, though in the novel they call this a governess rather than a nanny, the one in charge of Maisie's education. But the Miss Wix in the movie isn't even named -- Paddy Croft does get credited as "Mrs. Wix" on IMDB -- and she's in about three scenes before disappearing entirely. One might think she died, given that we see her once falling asleep while looking after Maisie.
It's interesting to me that the collaborators on this film should have felt that James missed so badly with the way he originally wrote these characters. I have no choice but to view their decision as correct, given that I have a 13-year relationship with those characters from the movie, and only a two-month relationship with the characters from the book. But their movie essentially changes the entire outcome of the events from James' novel, and in my estimation it is for the far, far better.
I do wonder if they might have envisioned a more faithful adaptation of the book, but that there was no realistic prospect of this selling. I hope that's not the case, because I think the way this movie goes is truly brilliant, and the chemistry between Skarsgard and Vanderham is just heart swooningly romantic. But what if they wanted to make a What Maisie Knew that ended unhappily, but their backers just told them this would never sell in the 2013 cinematic marketplace?
I hope that's not the case, because there's nothing cheap about this happy ending. Some movies will end happily despite ample evidence that they should not, and those are the sort we should look on suspiciously. What Maisie Knew ends happily for Maisie but at the cost of the fact that both of her biological parents have effectively given her up. (Beale initially tries to woo her to return to England with him, before realizing it's just not practical, but then he proceeds with his plans to decamp from New York anyway. Susanna fights tooth and nail not to exit her daughter's life, but she's ultimately more committed to her career than her daughter.)
So while this is, indeed, a happy ending, and especially for the kind souls Margo and Lincoln, it might be the sort of happy ending that James himself could have gotten behind, if he weren't being poisoned by an ultimate sense of bitterness and misanthropy.
