Movie Review: 'Maggie's Plan'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- If you want to make God laugh, goes the proverbial joke, just make a plan.
Well, that's what the protagonist does in Maggie's Plan as part of a strained attempt to make us laugh.
Maggie's Plan is a romantic comedy of sorts about a young woman trying to make it on her own in New York City.
And because she is played by Greta Gerwig, your tolerance or enjoyment of it will depend on just how charmed you are by the idiosyncratic appeal of this darling of independent cinema, whose shtick may be over-familiar at this point.
This is the first flat-out comedy from writer-director Rebecca Miller (the daughter of playwright Arthur and the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis), whose resume features Angela, Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. And she just may not be as suited to working comedically as she is dramatically – at least, not yet.
Miller's script is based on an unpublished story by Karen Rinaldi about Gerwig's Maggie, a flaky thirtysomething academic administrator at the New School in New York City who, given her ticking biological clock, plans to have a baby on her own via artificial insemination.
She picks out a guy she considers a suitable sperm donor, a Brooklyn pickle maker named Guy – who really is just some guy -- played by Travis Fimmel.
At one point, she looks at him and asks, "How much involvement do you want?"
And before he can answer, she says, "I would suggest none."
But her plan is derailed when she falls for John, a married and father-of-two adjunct professor and aspiring novelist played by Ethan Hawke, whom she has just met.
He asks her to read the first chapter of the book he's working on. She reads it and loves it. He loves her for loving it. She loves him for loving her back.
Anyway, so much for Maggie's plan.
Then John proceeds to leave his wife, Georgette, a tenured and celebrated Columbia professor played by Julianne Moore.
And Maggie and John have a daughter while Georgette writes a book about the end of their marriage.
Sure enough, though, Maggie's happiness and contentment with this arrangement don't last long and – hmmm -- she wonders whether perhaps she ought to try to get John and Georgette back together again.
Maggie's Plan sprinkles interesting satirical observations about the academic life throughout, and there's more than enough pomposity to go around, but most of it unspools like a screwball comedy in slow motion.
Moore has fun with her Danish accent and her severe intellectual affectations in a risky role played quite broadly, and she's funny and oddly poignant. But too much of everyone's dialogue tends to sound exactly that way – as dialogue rather than conversation.
The whimsy on display just isn't sufficiently anchored to the reality of the characters, their motivations, or their relationships.
This despite a promising ensemble cast that includes Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph as Maggie's close friends, in whom we have nearly as much interest and emotional involvement as we do in the three most prominent characters.
And therein lies the problem.
So we'll author 2 stars out of 4 for the unique but uneven love-triangle comedy, Maggie's Plan, involving the best-laid plans of mights and men and women.
