A chamber comedy set among New York City academics, Maggie’s Plan is so slight on the surface and so seemingly unambitious that its remarkable qualities sneak up on you. The “plan” of the title only begins to emerge after the first hour—and it is part of the considerable achievement of the writer-director Rebecca Miller that its rather outlandish design doesn’t seem in the least preposterous but rather flows organically from the film’s sly mood and its emotionally clueless characters.
Maggie (Greta Gerwig), an MBA whose job it is to help clueless artists in graduate programs at the New School try to make a living after they graduate, is in her early 30s. (We see her making a presentation to a toy company with a hapless student who’s invented a doll with a zipper pouch in its stomach with tiny stuffed internal organs inside.) Maggie has never had a relationship that lasted more than six months, and she is so organized and forward-thinking that she’s already decided to have a baby on her own rather than wait until insemination becomes more difficult with age.
Her best friend is her college boyfriend (a wonderful Bill Hader), who’s still in love with her despite being married with a child himself and is perpetually angry with the choices Maggie makes. He disapproves of the putative father, a thickly bearded Brooklyn “pickle entrepreneur” man-boy whose goal it is to get his work into Whole Foods.
Enter John (Ethan Hawke), an adjunct professor at her school who plays second fiddle to his wife Georgette (Julianne Moore), a beautiful but rigid Dane who is a full professor at Columbia. John is a “ficto-critical anthropologist,” an actual nonsense postmodern discipline of which Miller makes brilliant comic use. He wants to ditch everything but the “ficto” and become a novelist, and he’s taken with Maggie’s efforts on behalf of hapless academics in the real world. He asks her to read what he’s written, which turns out to be a fictionalized rant about how awful his wife is, how he must cater to her, and how she takes him for granted.
Maggie is pleased to serve as his amanuensis, and a character based on her begins to appear in the manuscript—a straightforward doer, a little colorless but very efficient. Finally he professes his love for her, and we flash-forward three years. John and Georgette are divorced, Maggie and John have a daughter, and suddenly it’s John who is the center of the universe and Maggie who is doing all the work in the marriage and having none of the fun. Meanwhile, John’s novel has turned into a Casaubon’s book—endless and pointless and lousy.
Maggie knows Georgette is still in love with him. “Nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do,” Georgette tells John in what passes for romantic dialogue in the ficto-critical anthropology community. And so Maggie hatches a plan that takes some interesting twists.
Gerwig is a lovable actress but a limited one—she pretty much acts the same whether she’s playing the control-freak Maggie, or a New York ditz (as in Mistress America), or a New York charmer (as in Frances Ha). She’s going to need to develop some different colors and shadings as a performer if she’s not going to wear out her welcome, but it works here. Just as in Boyhood, Hawke is proving himself an unaffected master of playing a weak and self-deluding American advancing into middle age. And this movie offers a happy reminder of how funny the usually over-angsty Julianne Moore can be. Like Meryl Streep a decade ago, she could use some light parts as she transitions into grande-dame status.
Writer-director Miller, daughter of Arthur and wife to Daniel Day-Lewis, has had one of the most interesting careers in the arts over the past three decades. She was a Botticelli-haired young actress, quite successful, with femme-fatale parts in Regarding Henry and a Kevin Kline-Kevin Spacey thriller called Consenting Adults. Then she quit acting and became a writer of short stories and novels before taking up screenwriting and directing.
Her work up until now (movies you’ve likely never heard of, like The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) has always been full of life but has had an unfortunately self-serious and pretentious streak. Setting her story among self-serious pretentious people whom she views at an amused distance has liberated Miller to make a literate screwball comedy of remarriage in which a divorced couple’s love-hate relationship is revealed during an intentionally ludicrous panel discussion about the semiotics of the Occupy Movement.
Maggie’s Plan is a very smart movie about superficially very smart people who are actually very stupid. You gotta love it.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
