A FEW years ago, someone important on the internet declared Greta Gerwig as her generation’s great screwball comedienne, a modern day Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell.
With her charming presence, big smile and fast-talking ways, Gerwig has already won over audiences in Frances Ha, Greenberg and Mistress America. Now, with the release of Maggie’s Plan, she can add another career highlight to her portfolio.
The titular Maggie may be practical and self-aware, unlike the characters Gerwig previously co-wrote with partner and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, but she’s still incredibly warm. This is becoming something of a signature for Gerwig, despite any other faults her characters may suffer.
Sick of waiting for the right guy, Maggie concocts a plan to have a baby with the help of a sperm donor. Before she can carry through with the arrangement, she meets John (Ethan Hawke), the “bad boy of fictocritical anthropology” whose specialty is “commodity fetishism”.
His Danish wife Georgette (Julianne Moore) is described by others as a “monster” and by him as “wonderful, she’s just kind of destroying my life”.
The best character dynamics are between Gerwig and Moore.Source:Supplied
Walking through New York while exchanging clever banter on meaningful subjects like destiny, Maggie and John fall for each other.
Fast forward a couple of years and the two are shacked up with a kid as well as the baggage that comes with an ex-wife who has just published a book about being jilted by her husband for a younger woman. Maggie also thinks she’s made a mistake marrying John — she’s increasingly neglected by him and burdened with all the household minutiae while he tries to finish his great novel.
The plot sounds a little maudlin, the arbitrary way people fall in and out of love, but it’s all played for delightful comedy in a way that more than a little resembles the better works of Woody Allen (the jaunty soundtrack and New York setting adding to the homage).
The characters are also just a bit Allen-esque in their neuroticism, introspection and caricature but director Rebecca Miller has crafted a film that’s better than anything Allen has done in many years (except for, maybe, Midnight in Paris).
‘No, no, it’s fictoanthropology, not frictoanthropology.’Source:Supplied
Gerwig, Hawke and Moore are pitch perfect in their performances, working best when the dynamic involves the tinderbox situation created by these three intelligent but unchangeable characters. Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader provide welcome background support.
What also works is the world of Maggie’s Plan, a special subculture of New York academics, the kind that pins anti-fracking badges to their babies, attend conferences where Slavoj Zizek is the headliner and pickle entrepreneurs are a real thing. The film is in itself almost an anthropological study.
Maggie’s Plan is imbued with the kind of navel gazing that will inevitably grate on some viewers without the patience for it but for everyone else, there is much to like in this engaging and sweet screwball comedy.
Maggie’s Plan: A sweet and engaging screwball comedy
4/
5
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