The rebellious power of a little girl named Eloise
There are many reasons to wish that It’s Me, Hilary, Matt Wolf, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s 35-minute HBO documentary about Hilary Knight, who illustrated the books by Kay Thompson about a little girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York, had been longer.
The stories of Knight and Thompson’s roles in the culture of the 1950s, their brief, brilliant collaboration on Eloise, who arrived in print in 1955, and their subsequent split, are material enough for a fulllength film on their own.
And most of all, I wish Wolf, Dunham and Konner had made time to chart Eloise’s cultural family tree, given how many marvellous descendants this weird, wonderful, abandoned little girl has produced.
Eloise’s unruly, confident descendants, including selfish gynecologist Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) and Dunham’s Hannah Horvath on Girls are presently occupying television with all the same confidence Eloise used to declare her address at the Plaza.
I wish It’s Me, Hilary had more time to let its interview subjects make connections between Eloise’s rebellions and their own creations.
“She has a sense of place and a sense that she deserves to be where she is,” Dunham, who has a tattoo of a winged and haloed Eloise, noted, recalling in particular the way Eloise’s stomach hung over her skirts and showed through her frequently untucked shirts.
Generations later, Hannah Horvath’s clothes fit just as poorly, though she wears them with less of the brio of her younger predecessor.
Mindy Kaling, the creator of The Mindy Project, had perhaps my favourite insight into the character when she suggested that in a liveaction adaptation, the best person to play Eloise would be Paul Giamatti, an actor who often takes on characters who are slovenly and expansive. “The spirit of Eloise is not in a little blond girl,” Kaling says in the documentary. “She could be so unlikable. But she’s not because the illustrations are so appealing.”
Her mother is a powerful presence in Eloise’s life, but she’s always off the page, leaving Eloise to terrorize her Nanny, cavort with her dog Weenie and to charge everything with the imperiousness of a Park Avenue matron.
In an adult, these indulgences might seem rather exhausting, to put it in Eloisiana. But in a six-yearold such excesses are charming.
Eloise never has to grow up, which means we never have to grow out of loving her and she never has to compromise to try to preserve our affections.