Warm and wacky film exerts irresistible charm
OBODY unpacks commodity fetishism like you do.” Such a statement counts as billing and cooing in Maggie’s Plan, a winning romantic comedy that, despite its ungainliness and sometimes irritatingly broad characters, brings welcome sharpness to a genre usually awash in soft-focus hearts and flowers.
A remarriage farce set in the rarefied, jargon-filled world of New York academia, filmmaker Miller’s venture into satire takes a comfortable place on a shelf already occupied by Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcener.
Best known for such dramas as Personal Velocity and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Miller doesn’t possess the structural and tonal chops of those directors, or at least not yet. But Maggie’s Plan oozes with charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.
Gerwig plays a bright 30-ish woman who works at the New School for Social Research and has decided she wants Rebecca Miller Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Monte Greene, Travis Fimmel 13 L 98 minutes to be a mother. After deciding to go it alone, Maggie meets John (Hawke), a “ficto-critical anthropologist” who’s in a troubled marriage to Georgette (Moore), an intellectually imposing author for whom he has subsumed his own writerly ambitions. An affair between needy John and the yielding Maggie is inescapable, as are the break-up and blended families that follow – developments that prompt a case of cold feet in Maggie, who decides to manipulate John and Georgette into getting back together.
It’s the stuff of screwball comedy, a genre Miller embraces. The characters – inspired by an unpublished novel by Karen Rinaldi – come dangerously close to caricatures, especially Moore’s vaguely Teutonic embodiment of poststructuralism at its most humourless and rigid, but the actors infuse them with such spirit and sympathy that Maggie’s Plan takes on the glow and infectious warmth of an ensemble piece fired by genuine affection.
Viewers familiar with Rinaldi’s real-life role in the dissolution of a New York literary marriage in the 1990s (chronicled in Catherine Texier’s scathing roman-a-clef, Breakup) might look askance at the film’s portrayal of the Other Woman as an unthreatening, almost dowdy Quaker who dresses in calf-length jumpers and thick stockings. (“So pure,” Georgette says of Maggie at one point, “and a little stupid.”)
The film offers a gently jaundiced, always generous view of so many dynamics that animate love and commitment: the delicate dance between ego and self-sacrifice, how passion gives way to phones and logistics, forgoing selfdeception for tough honesty and, finally, how friendship and genuine forms of intimacy can emerge from the messiest circumstances.
Gerwig and Hawke are superb in their roles and Hader steals every scene he’s in as Maggie’s supportive-ish ex-boyfriend.
But it’s Moore’s icy, profoundly wounded Georgette who holds Maggie’s Plan together. Olympian, intimidatingly stylish, never less than searingly frank, her character manages to wriggle out of the unflattering confines of her initial characterisation to become the unlikely saviour of the whole enterprise. She and her co-stars create a romantic triangle for the ages. True to its title, Maggie’s Plan is so crazy that it just might work – and it does. –Washington Post