A contemporary New York rom-com set among people who sip from NPR mugs in bed and slip phrases like “ficto-critical anthropology” into conversation, “Maggie’s Plan” sounds like something you’ve seen already. But writer/director Rebecca Miller has something else in mind: It’s a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.
Maggie (Greta Gerwig, nicely deploying her scattery, young-Diane Keaton-ish quality), in her 30s and wanting a child, makes a plan, as is her habit: She’ll become a single mother with a bit of help from a former college acquaintance (Travis Fimmel) who’s a “pickle entrepreneur.” But a funny thing happens on the way to insemination: Maggie meets and falls in love with John (Ethan Hawke), a professor and would-be novelist, who’s married to the brilliant Danish academic Georgette (Julianne Moore).
The screwball? It’s in that insemination scene (there’s a sudden, wonderfully ill-timed phone call); it’s in Gerwig’s way of walking and talking in funny, explosive little spurts; it’s in the way everyone in the movie seems to be dancing circles around everyone else. The Shakespeare? There’s a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” quality to the whole thing, from an actor overheard in the park (“Who will not change a raven for a dove?”) to Maggie’s well-meaning scheme to solve an unexpected love triangle. Other pleasures: the language (when’s the last time you saw a movie in which someone murmured “Nobody unpacks commodity fetishisms like you do”?) and the funny character detail. I particularly appreciated Moore’s volcanic Georgette and Bill Hader as Maggie’s faithful confidante.
