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What Maisie Knew: the actual movie!
Quick reaction: I love it and I want all the Yuletidening!
Guyyyyyyyyyyyys I loved it a LOT. I had formed a pretty clear mental model of the movie from the trailer and reading the Henry James novel while accounting for the fact that this movie would not feel the need to - would in fact feel the need not to - enforce Victorian morality on its characters. I was a little worried that the movie would a) somehow deviate from that mental model in a disappointing way or b) not fill me with feelings because I already knew just how it would go or c) be such perfectly satisfying kidfic already that I would feel no need or space for actual fic of it.
Happily none of those happened! It was exactly the movie I expected it to be (Maisie ends the movie having found a happy family with her stepfather and stepmother, who have both abandoned their respective brief, unhappy, ill-founded marriages with her parents (who have to varying extents abandoned Maisie to their spouses in turn) and fallen in love with each other). It was FULL OF FEELS OMG.
And, because the title is taken as a statement of POV (Henry James treated it more as the label on a treatise on moral education), we really don't know a lot about how most of that happens. We see almost nothing Maisie doesn't see: the arguments she overhears or is caught in the middle of, the displays of affection she glimpses. Margo and Lincoln's relationship with each other is totally delightful and satisfying at the same time that we have no real idea how they fell in love with each other. We do see the way their relationships with Maisie develop and, ugh, did I mention feels? SO MANY FEELS, OMG.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LINCOLN AND MAISIE SO ADORABLE. We see their relationship from first contact to effective adoption (which, er, only seems to span a couple of months but I guess I can't quibble with how fast a character played by ASkars steps into stepfatherhood for life) and it is a GLORIOUS arc. Lincoln starts out vague and awkward and just INVESTS in this kid, just tunes in to her and cares about her and is the first person in the whole length of the movie who explicitly makes a decision based on what's good for her even though it will cause him difficulty.
Also his spread hand covers half of her back and even in the movie people are all HE'S SO TALL. AND DREAMY. Although most of his wardrobe consists of baggy, holey t-shirts and skinny jeans, which ... is a look. It's really fascinating, given that it's five years later, how much younger he clearly is than Brad Colbert.
And now I'm going to end this post before I start speculating about legal custody, immigration law, and other assorted topics to be explored at length in Yuletide fic. Unless you would like to talk about those things in comments THEN WE CAN TOTALLY TALK IN COMMENTS. ALSO EVERYBODY PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE BEFORE YULETIDE OMG.
Guyyyyyyyyyyyys I loved it a LOT. I had formed a pretty clear mental model of the movie from the trailer and reading the Henry James novel while accounting for the fact that this movie would not feel the need to - would in fact feel the need not to - enforce Victorian morality on its characters. I was a little worried that the movie would a) somehow deviate from that mental model in a disappointing way or b) not fill me with feelings because I already knew just how it would go or c) be such perfectly satisfying kidfic already that I would feel no need or space for actual fic of it.
Happily none of those happened! It was exactly the movie I expected it to be (Maisie ends the movie having found a happy family with her stepfather and stepmother, who have both abandoned their respective brief, unhappy, ill-founded marriages with her parents (who have to varying extents abandoned Maisie to their spouses in turn) and fallen in love with each other). It was FULL OF FEELS OMG.
And, because the title is taken as a statement of POV (Henry James treated it more as the label on a treatise on moral education), we really don't know a lot about how most of that happens. We see almost nothing Maisie doesn't see: the arguments she overhears or is caught in the middle of, the displays of affection she glimpses. Margo and Lincoln's relationship with each other is totally delightful and satisfying at the same time that we have no real idea how they fell in love with each other. We do see the way their relationships with Maisie develop and, ugh, did I mention feels? SO MANY FEELS, OMG.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LINCOLN AND MAISIE SO ADORABLE. We see their relationship from first contact to effective adoption (which, er, only seems to span a couple of months but I guess I can't quibble with how fast a character played by ASkars steps into stepfatherhood for life) and it is a GLORIOUS arc. Lincoln starts out vague and awkward and just INVESTS in this kid, just tunes in to her and cares about her and is the first person in the whole length of the movie who explicitly makes a decision based on what's good for her even though it will cause him difficulty.
Also his spread hand covers half of her back and even in the movie people are all HE'S SO TALL. AND DREAMY. Although most of his wardrobe consists of baggy, holey t-shirts and skinny jeans, which ... is a look. It's really fascinating, given that it's five years later, how much younger he clearly is than Brad Colbert.
And now I'm going to end this post before I start speculating about legal custody, immigration law, and other assorted topics to be explored at length in Yuletide fic. Unless you would like to talk about those things in comments THEN WE CAN TOTALLY TALK IN COMMENTS. ALSO EVERYBODY PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE BEFORE YULETIDE OMG.

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Well, it doesn't hurt... g