A Modern 'Maisie,' Still Yoked To Absurd Adults
The technique works, thanks in large part to one of those precociously naturalistic child-actor performances from the sad-eyed Onata Aprile. She's not the only one making these lives feel honestly lived-in, though; the entire cast is doing standout work.
Coogan has made a career of playing the sort of egotist he inhabits in Beale, and Moore astutely goes right up to the edge of making Susanna an irredeemable monster before backing off and giving her just a touch of humanity.
The real surprise is Alexander Skarsgard as Lincoln, a sweetly naive bartender whom Susanna marries in a hurry, purely out of revenge — Beale has married Margo immediately after their divorce. Skarsgard, best known stateside for his brooding intensity as Eric on HBO's campy vampire soap opera True Blood, plays Lincoln as the tender, caring parental surrogate Maisie needs, presenting him at first as a bit of a simpleton, but then ensuring that that first impression gives way to a sense that he simply shares a childlike natural trust with his new stepdaughter.
Margo and Lincoln, unfortunately, are as much pawns in the bitter, nasty games that Beale and Susanna play with each other as Maisie is. That does give the three something in common, of course, all of them being human collateral damage in the constant emotional warfare. It comes as no surprise when the real parents' neglect of both their partners and their child brings the castoffs together into an alternate family unit.
The honesty of these performances helps compensate for some clumsiness in the plotting; screenwriters Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright sometimes seem unsure how far to stray from James' text. Mrs. Wix, the elderly woman who takes over as Maisie's nanny, is a key character in the book, for instance. In the movie she's reduced to a single brief scene before disappearing entirely, never to be mentioned again. Her appearance feels as if it comes out of a sense of duty to the original rather than to the film that's actually being made; leaving her out completely would have made more sense, given that the filmmakers want to concentrate on the contrasts between Maisie's relationships with her real parents versus her unofficially adoptive ones.
The film raises more uncomfortable questions about Maisie's uncertain future than it ever answers, but that's in keeping with the emotional honesty the filmmakers are striving for. If Maisie knew everything, there'd be nowhere left for her to go after the credits roll.