Child’s play: What Maisie Knew

Watching What Maisie Knew, I thought, it’s a pity that Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore aren’t good parents. In Scott McGehee and Dave Siegel’s adaptation of the excellent Henry James novel, they play Manhattanites who use their child Maisie (Onata Aprile) for recriminatory ends. “The court says I shouldn’t say anything, but you should really watch yourself when you’re alone with Daddy,” Moore says to Aprile at a point of crisis. He plays a international man of business who makes enough money to keep his hair long and unkempt in the back; she’s a singer-songwriter whose voice and chords suggest Courtney Love after Oscar respectability. The only person who pays attention to her while coloring and doesn’t smother her with the kisses that are the hallmark of adults trying too hard is nanny Margo (Joanna Vanderham), a Scot whom Maisie learns her father is romancing and later marries. Not to be undone, her mom marries a bartender named Lincoln, played by Alexander Skarsgård as an aw-shucks type whose bangs are “Melrose Place” circa 1992 and his courtliness Esquire circa 2002. The twist: the nanny and the stepdad fall in love, in part because they both love Maisie.

In an exhaustive, clever essay titled “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Edmund Wilson praises What Maisie Knew for the way in which James finds a solution to his problems with clarity and structure: tell the story from the point of view of a child. “Small children have many more perception than they have terms to translate them,” James wrote in the preface to the novel. “Their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, all too reducible vocabulary.” Taut and grounded in the everyday, McGehee-Siegel stay with Maisie’s perceptions to a remarkable degree. Their lacuna reflect the gaps of a child’s understanding. One moment Maisie enjoys two squabbling parents, the next they’re in child custody court, sweet talking her about being a flower girl. McGehee and Siegel deserve credit for urging Aprile to perform instead of act. She isn’t adorable, she isn’t precocious — she’s a six-year-old girl still sorting out her place in an ever-shifting firmament. The parents love Maisie, but in a distracted way. At first Moore behaves like the better parent, until her self-esteem prevents Lionel from getting intimate with his stepdaughter.

Modern audiences might balk at the alternative family that McGehee-Siegel (and James) propose; the literalizing way of film demands a visceral grappling with its reality that readers stick to imagining in broad strokes. But until a soggy Mickey Mouse-ed ending What Maisie Knew doesn’t step wrong.