The Henry James novel on which this film is based is, by all accounts, an angry attack on the irresponsibility of divorced parents who use their children as weapons against each other. It's a sadly and strikingly modern story - and it was written in 1897.
Directors McGehee and Siegel,
working from a script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, have underlined that timelessness with an intelligent and sensitive portrait of the toll that adult self-centredness can take on children.
The co-directors showed with the terrific 2001 Tilda Swinton thriller The Deep End their sure feel for the curdled nature of family dynamics and they nail it here, too.
Crucially, their film matches James' mastery of a then-novel narrative technique that explores the world from a single character's point of view. The novel isn't told in the first person, but from page one, in which Beale and Ida Farange are being divorced and Maisie is condemned to shuttle between them ("rebounding from racket to racket like a tennis ball or a shuttlecock", James wrote) it adopts a child's-eye view.
As the title suggests, this is a story of adults behaving like spoilt and petulant children, while the real child sees much more than she understands. Alive to that, the directors often place the camera at child height, so the world through which Maisie moves seems large, threatening and out of control.
