No one in James works for a living except the servants, but in the film Maisie’s father, too, has just enough of a profession to account for the couple’s expensive habits and erratic work schedules.
And rather than an aging beauty with a talent for billiards, her mother is a fading rock star, whose former earnings have apparently bankrolled the lavish apartment. Rather than a London townhouse, this Maisie inhabits an upscale loft in contemporary Manhattan. The film’s change of venue makes for some witty transpositions of the Jamesian originals. The one time Maisie imagines otherwise proves the rule: “The next moment she was on her mother’s breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust into a jeweller’s shop-front.” But there is nothing in James’s novel that resembles the maternal tenderness she nonetheless summons up for her daughter.
Maisie’s mother, Julianne Moore, makes clear from the very beginning that she has other things on her mind besides crooning her child to sleep.
For anyone familiar with the source of the film, this is a startling sequence - and not because it swiftly establishes that Henry James’s late-Victorian novel of divorce has been updated for a modern audience. SCOTT MCGEHEE AND DAVID SIEGEL'S What Maisie Knew opens with a small girl being carried down a darkened corridor and placed gently in bed by a longhaired woman, who proceeds to sing her to sleep with the aid of a guitar.
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