Maggie's Plan

Among many other things, the best dialogue-driven character studies can create a sense of real connectedness between the viewer and the people depicted on screen. If well narrated, those films can serve as a mirror to your own experiences or open up new perspectives on life in general. Directors that have managed to achieve this in the past like (the early) Woody Allen or Noah Baumbach are also often named as references when it comes to Rebecca Miller's latest film Maggie's Plan.

Indeed, when you saw the trailer, you got the feeling a new Baumbach is coming up: set in New York, starring Greta Gerwig playing a Gerta Gerwig-character and a plot revolving around existential questions of a group of well-educated, slightly quirky people. I love all of these elements and mixed with a cast including Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore I was very excited to see this film.

However, the aspects of indie films I mentioned above which I deem so important are all missing here. Once you have accepted the awkward premise (which is far-fetched enough) that the protagonist Maggie (Greta Gerwig) desperately wants to reunite her husband John (Ethan Hawke) with his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), the film misses all its chances to handle the characters' issues with precision and depth. This starts with the poor writing which does include some amusing lines and interesting insights (my favourite being John's take on unborn babies) but still fails to make the characters' motivations and intentions appear reasonable. Despite the fact that they are always quite short, films like The Squid and the Whale never feel rushed. In Maggie's Plan we see many rapid developments and turns in attitude that are often hard to make sense of.

Apart from problems in the script, the film suffers from the way it is directed. One major element is a trope that is more than predominant in recent cinema which comes down to a formula many directors seem to have internalised deeply: Shaky camera = Authenticity. In order to immerse the viewer within a scene, many films employ this technique, however in many cases in such a exaggerated manner that it becomes a parody of itself (Exhibit A: The Hunger Games; Counterexample (how it should be done): Children of Men). The same is the case in Maggie's Plan. It is the film's ambition to live up to its predecessors by offering a perspective that feels true to life. But unnecessary zoom-ins, shakes and pans occasionally disrupt the viewing experience. Films that rely on quiet, emotional scenes like this one benefit from a rather still, observant depiction, so that the viewer likely forgets that there is a camera.

Having said all this, I still consider Maggie's Plan an average film which is mostly due to the cast. The actors do what they can to give the weird script at least some emotional depth (even though I add Julianne Moore's choice of accent to the list of things that bewildered me). My harsh critique is probably due to high expectations. But I just didn't assume they were that high, as I would have been happy, if some main elements that separate these kinds of films from major blockbusters had been displayed.

My main concern with this review is to counter the many voices comparing this film to indie masterpieces like Frances Ha or Annie Hall. Maggie's Plan is not even close to being in the same league. To quote Pulp Fiction, it is not even the same sport.

New Yorker Maggie Hardin (Greta Gerwig) wants to have a baby. Her relationships never last more than six months except her college romance with best friend Tony (Bill Hader) but that doesn't count. She decides to get sperm from college acquaintance, pickle entrepreneur Guy Childers. She works at an art school with Tony's wife Felicia (Maya Rudolph) and John Harding (Ethan Hawke). Maggie and John meet over a paycheck mixup and start a relationship over a novel he's trying to write. He's unhappily married to Columbia professor Georgette (Julianne Moore) with two kids.

The appeal of this movie depends a lot on one's appreciation of Gerwig's flighty, quirky persona. It's a rom-com where the romance is not the most likable. Harding starts off poorly and I never find him a good match for Maggie. Even the pickle guy is better although Tony could be the best if there is no Felicia. I'm actually glad at the turn in the second half of the movie and it becomes an anti-rom-com. The funniest relationship is between Maggie and Georgette. The movie could do with more of them together.

The eternal triangle and the romantic comedy have been soulmates forever but how many ways you can tell the same old love story? The era of female empowerment and emotional recycling is upon us, so it is refreshing to see Maggie's Plan (2016) take an old story formula and update it with offbeat humour centred on modern marriage. Contemporary lifestyle choices such as wanting a baby but not a man or handing a used lover back to a former owner are just some of the scenarios played out in this intelligent and delightful rom-rom.

The simple triangular plot pivots on independent-minded Maggie (Greta Gerwig), an over-controller who loves falling in love but cannot keep a relationship longer than six months. Wanting a baby without the strings, she arranges for a sperm donor just as she meets John (Ethan Hawke), an insecure academic who is emasculated by the stellar career of his imperious wife Georgette (Julianne Moore). John's need for constant mothering is no longer fulfilled by the dynamic Georgette, so Maggie and John inevitably pair up and one corner of the triangle disappears. Three years later, Maggie is over the needy John and his permanently incomplete 'great novel' so she hatches a plan to reunite John with Georgette. A clever script laced with tangled textual barbs like "ficto-critical anthropology" (Google it) and one-liners like "nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do" are rapid-fire and hilarious send-ups of the pretentious world of academe. It is at this level that the film shines brightest: not with belly laughs or madcap comedy, but through a whimsical lens focused on the world of intelligent people who think they control the ebbs and flows of the uncontrollable.

The acting performances are all top-shelf. Julianne Moore plays the understated dominatrix with a hilarious deadpan Danish accent, and Ethan Hawke is perfect as the hapless male out-powered by the females in his life. The standout performance is Greta Gerwig whose big doe-eyed innocence and naivety about the ways of the world make her scheming utterly forgivable. While the story has a predictable narrative arc, the dialogue is richly satirical, funny and totally female-centered. It is also an entertaining post-feminist comedy about sex and marriage which imagines a future where males are only needed for sperm and are then recycled amongst whoever will tolerate their innate weaknesses.

Here New York singleton Maggie is played by Greta Gerwig, an actress who can be funny and serious, pretty and plain, switching from one to the other in seconds. Her original plan is to have a baby through a sperm donor, although later in the movie she conceives (sorry for the pun) another plan involving her husband, self-absorbed academic John (Ethan Hawke in a classic verbose role), and his ex-wife, the Danish ambitious academic Georgette (the ever-able Juliette Moore). The moral of the story is that our plans often don't work out as we expect and, even when they do, it might not actually be because of us.

I think this is an under-rated movie with interesting characters and real charm. There are no action sequences or dramatic conflicts, but it is quietly engaging and insightful. Rebecaa Miller wrote and directed it from the novel by Karen Rinaldi and the most intriguing relationship is between Maggie and Georgette, so some will be tempted to dismiss it as a woman's film, but I recommend it to anyone who wants something a bit more lifelike and thoughtful compared to the more traditional rom-com.

Greta Gerwig is one of the most interesting young stars in Hollywood. She consistently chooses interesting, under-the-radar projects that deal with human issues in a unique way. Maggie's Plan struggles to balance a grounded story that's centered upon one ridiculous romantic (or rather, unromantic) plan.

Goofy, eccentric, and mostly well-acted, Maggie's Plan is a good attempt at a Richard Linklater comedy-romance-drama plot. Really though, this film is a stranger version of Linklater's Before Trilogy. Only, it's much harder to relate to for a 22-year-old guy yet to be married or having any sort of mid-life crisis. The film deals with a half-dozen adult characters who have no clue what they truly want out of a relationship. Maggie, played by Gerwig, has an affair with John (Ethan Hawke) which ruins his marriage. In turn, the two get married, but struggle to bolster a relationship on their own. And so, thus gives us our main conflict, Maggie attempts to arrange John back up with his ex-wife to ease the pain of an actual divorce. Yes, it's that ridiculous.

I think this premise is better off as the basis of a straight comedy. At times, Maggie's Plan takes itself a little too seriously and forgets just how hard to believe its own ideas are. Should I be worried for the sanity of the main characters or should I take the ridiculousness for what it is and laugh about it? That's the constant argument I had throughout, and I don't know that the film even knows the answer.

The saving grace is that all of the actors are so dang charming and charismatic that it's hard to not like their work here. Gerwig has this angelic poise to her performance, and Ethan Hawke is Ethan Hawke. He's great in everything. Not to mention the levity brought by Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph in supporting roles, Maggie's Plan is one of the better ensemble cast assembled of this year. However, I found Julianne Moore's accent to be incredibly distracting. She's a world class actress, but I'm not sure this was her best work.

Maggie's Plan doesn't try to be the most charming nor the most poignant, but that's really the film's biggest issue. It has no real identity. When plot progression is made you don't know how to feel because there is no true basis or end goal in mind. So what could have been a goofily unpredictable rom-com-dram, turned out to be a disappointing and forgettable film for 2016.

+Gerwig is always charming

+Hader & Rudolph kill it

-Moore's accent

-Identity crisis

-Difficult to connect to

5.0/10