Title: WHAT MAISIE KNEW

Opens: May 3, 2013

Given that one does not need a license to take on the most important job in the world—being a parent—it’s no wonder that so many children become neurotic, depressed, angry, bored, and just about any other downer term you can think of. Parents come from all walks of life, few are acquainted with the writing of Dr. Spock and others, and even those who are well-read in the field may turn out to be bad for their offspring. Perhaps what’s even worse—as Scott McGehee and David Siegel probe in “What Maisie Knew”—is for a dad and mom to have genuine love for their kids but who, by giving priority to their own careers, are poor role models for their young.

One wonders, in fact whether Susanna (Julianne Moore) and her ex-husband Beale (Steve Coogan), really love their six-year-old as much as they seem to demonstrate in the movie, which is a modern adaptation of Henry James’s 1897 novel about divorce. When they battle in court for custody of little Maisie (Onata Aprile), they may be doing so not because it’s in their daughter’s best interests but simply as a power struggle between two people who have grown to hate each other and to argue incessantly. Yet, materially they couldn’t be better off. He is a successful art dealer who needs to travel often to Europe, and she is an aging rock star who must also be on the road to perform. They had shared a fabulous apartment in Manhattan, and, in fact, after the divorce, Beale has married their ex-nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), though he has not put her on the lease and has in fact locked her out of the apartment. As if Susanna must keep up with her rival, she hitches up with Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard), a young, slim, handsome bartender. There’s more. When Susanna’s new husband Lincoln has a fling with ex-nanny Margo, the tension increases unbearably with Maisie caught in the middle.

Maisie, by the way, is a terrific kid who has had to listen to her parents’ loud arguments in the next room frequently even as they come close to physical battle, while the six-year-old throws no tantrums, cries only once, and does her homework in an elite school as though all is well at home. As played by Onata Aprile (whose personal details are strangely missing on the Internet Movie Database so we don’t know her real age), Maisie takes in the scenes from her young, innocent view, and the camera is often placed on her level to guarantee that the audience will get the point. Mothers generally want their children to be friendly and even loving to stepfathers—in the event of a second marriage—yet we are not surprised that when Maisie at first distances herself from the awkward Lincoln who is not used to dealing with kids but then warms up to him, Susanna actually discourages the affection. It’s all part of the power struggle that is marriage.

Henry James, who wrote the relatively short novel 116 years ago, looks particularly at the death of childhood, a Dickensian vision and savage comedy that should warn parents about arguing and playing sexual games in front of their young ones. Yet we can be assured that even those of us who are well-read are more committed to acting out frustrations, self-defeating as this may be, than of restraining our ids and egos even while under the noses of our kids.

The film is heart-rending, but the tragic aspects are made up for when Maisie bonds beautifully with bartender and nanny. Onata Aprile is sensational, a Shirley Temple in the making who has already been seen as one of four children in Nick Cassavetes’s “Yellow,” also about child abuse, and in John Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walker’s “The History of Future Folk,” about two travelers from the planet Hondo.

Rated R. 105 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B+