Where is what maisie knew showing

Fairchild-Tetenbaum as Ms. Paddy Croft Mrs. Wix as Mrs. Trevor Long Musician 1 as Musician 1. Emma Holzer Holly as Holly. Nadia Gan Hostess as Hostess. Anne O'Shea Administrator as Administrator.

Malachi Weir Manager as Manager. Ellen Crown Counselor as Counselor. Scott McGehee David Siegel. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. It revolves around unwitting 7-year-old Maisie, caught in the middle of a custody battle between her mother Suzanna, an aging rock star, and her father, Beale, a major art dealer.

In a race to win the court's advantage, Beale marries Maisie's nanny Margo, prompting Suzanna in turn to marry friend and local bartender, Lincoln. Both forced into a battle neither wishes to be a part of, Margo and Lincoln come to empathize with Maisie's position and over time with one another's.

Teased by the notion of making their own surrogate family, the trio must either submit to the will of Maisie's parents or eventually face their wrath. Hold on with all your heart. Rated R for some language. Did you know Edit. Quotes Lincoln : I'm her From the first moment of her stay the homely governess with her flushed face is a discordant note in the general beauty and harmony of France. She is still more so when she walks with Maisie to the fortifications that hang over the town.

There James once more figures synthetically and by means of concrete symbols the meaning of the whole. The old bench on which Maisie and Mrs.

There Mrs. But their reaction is quite different. The passage is important and worth quoting in full:. To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was perhaps better still to creep in the shade—for the sun was strong— along the many-coloured and many-odoured port and through the streets in which, to English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery and everything that was different a joke.

They sat together on the old grey bastion; they looked down on the little new town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and the high gilt Virgin of the church that, as they gathered, was famous and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards and Mrs. Wix confessed that for herself she had probably made a fatal mistake early in life in not being a Catholic.

But at the same time she also notices the limits of Mrs. Quite ironically the parts are reversed and it is Maisie who wants to teach her governess. She wants to make her see all that she herself sees and enjoys, she wants to make her use her senses and her imagination. But in Mrs. Wix a strong, narrow, and restrictive moral sense takes the place of imagination and she twice asks Maisie whether she has really no moral sense.

She tries to make the girl understand that Sir Claude must give up Mrs. Beale if he wants to keep Maisie. Maisie has just told Sir Claude that she is willing to give up Mrs.

Wix if he accepts to give up Mrs. If he does she will let her old governess go back alone to England and they will remain together in an ideally beautiful world:. But it brought his eyes back to her as if after an instant he could see the place and the thing she named—could see her sitting there alone. The statue, which is evoked three times in the novel, is its central symbol and has different meanings for each of the characters. For Maisie the Madonna of the Catholics is the ideal mother: unlike Ida she is motherly and loving, unlike Mrs.

Beale she is innocent and good, unlike Mrs. Wix she is beautiful and sympathetic to life. For the Low Church governess the Virgin is associated with another kind of worship for which she cannot help feeling a kind of vague nostalgia when she visits the church in Boulogne.

For Sir Claude at last, the golden Madonna, standing alone in front of the sea, is Maisie herself, a twelve-year-old virgin on the border of life and of experience.

Maisie has stood for a long time on her balcony—a distant place again—enjoying the beautiful warm night, the chatter in the animated street, the life on the quays and the general brightness and amenity around her:. She hung over the rail; she felt the summer night; she dropped down into the manners of France. Wix did: Mrs. Wix remained within, as still as a mouse and perhaps not reached by the performance.

After a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. Her mother Susanna Julianne Moore is a rock star, working on a new album, and her father Beale Steve Coogan is a businessman, always on his cell phone.

Their vicious arguments are constant background noise in Maisie's life, and she is shown coloring in her room or playing with her toy horses as the sounds of parental hatred ricochet up through the floorboards. It might as well be traffic outside for all Maisie reacts to it. Divorce is clearly inevitable with these two, but it is once they separate that the combat really begins. Maisie's sweet nanny Margo Joanna Vanderham is suddenly ensconced at her father's new apartment, ostensibly to keep taking care of Maisie, but really because she has entered into a romantic relationship with Beale.

There's a sickening sense in these scenes of adults trying to "get away with something" in front of a child. Maisie's father, brilliantly played by Coogan as a nasty piece of work, couldn't care less. Maisie is irrelevant to him, except as a means of getting back at his ex-wife. Susanna is jealous of the natural, affectionate bond between her new husband and her daughter, perhaps because her own gestures of love come off as so empty.

When Margo asks Maisie at one point, "You like Lincoln, don't you? Maisie knows love when she sees it. The screenplay, by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright , avoids a sentimental tone, which helps enormously with such tricky material. Maisie does not seem like a typical "movie child," and this is a credit to the young actress playing the role, as well as to the restraint of co-directors McGehee and Siegel. Maisie is not precocious, she doesn't throw tantrums and in only one scene do we see her shed a tear.

Overshadowed by her flawed but fascinating mother and father, Maisie played by the sympathetic young actress Onata Aprile is reduced to the obedient, endlessly accommodating, and improbably well-behaved cipher she might have been in the book, had James not devoted so much of his energy into detailing every significant and minute shift in her understanding of herself and of the adults around her. From the opening pages, James merges the voice and the perspective of the author with that of his young protagonist, thus boldly circumventing any doubts about whether a child would use the word objurgation.

She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self, or, in other words, of concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult… Her parted lips locked themselves with a determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen… She saw more and more; she saw too much.

Unable to convey the psychological depth and preternatural maturity that James gives his fictional heroine, McGehee and Siegel have turned Maisie into a wide-eyed, passive observer, watching the grown-ups misbehave, freely giving the comforting and consoling hugs that her parents seem to need, and never showing the slightest sign of the temper, exhaustion, or exasperation. Even when she is forgotten by all her caretakers and awakens to find that she has been left to spend the night with slightly scary strangers, Maisie sheds but a single tear—instead of screaming her head off, which, under the circumstances, might seem a more appropriate reaction.

Maisie introduces the new spouses, and they proceed to fall in love. Maisie is left largely in the care of Mrs. Wix, the elderly governess hired to replace Miss Overmore. While the screenplay follows a similar arc, the excision from the plot of Mrs. Margo and Lincoln are not only young but genuine and loving, and the effect of their physical beauty is telegraphed more rapidly and directly than even Henry James—or any writer—can manage.

Once they conquer their prudent reservations about the vaguely incestuous aspects of their attraction and admit that they belong together, they provide the safe harbor where Maisie can at last find refuge from the harrowing storms of her childhood.