Woody Allen finally decided to see the world after decades of focusing on a certain borough of New York City. Never fear: The Manhattan vacuum has been filled by a new generation of filmmakers who set their lenses on the Big Apple’s intelligentsia. Among them, director Rebecca Miller, whose latest, Maggie’s Plan, centers around the romantic tangles of 30-something academics at The New School and Columbia.
Greta Gerwig stars as Maggie, a career counselor for art majors (an amusing notion) who might benefit from some relationship counseling. Obsessed with her own emotional hygiene, she fears committing to a man but wants a child desperately. Maggie resolves to buy sperm from an old college friend who abandoned mathematics for making artisanal pickles. But she encounters a handsome, frustrated “ficto-critical anthropologist,” John (Ethan Hawke). Pretty soon he’s showing her his novel in progress. Pretty soon they fall in love—but there is the glacial obstacle of John’s wife Georgette (Julianne Moore), an intimidating tenured professor who thinks with the precision of a sharpened scalpel and speaks in clipped trans-Northern European accents.
Similarities with Allen’s oeuvre abound. Maggie’s Plan is accompanied by old-time music (albeit from 1960s Jamaica, not 1920s New Orleans) and is constructed from a sequence of conversations. The discussions occur on the wintry Manhattan streets, on park benches and hallways of The New School, or in the designer condos and bohemian flats of its characters. Hawke gives a granular, nuanced performance as an intellectual of working-class origins who finds himself bonded to two quite different women. Moore is memorably high-strung while Gerwig is believably quotidian as the girl from Wisconsin who wants to bring order to the unruly illogic of human emotions. All of them, even the terrifying Georgette, are sympathetic in their flaws.
The trio’s emotional entanglement is the engine driving the plot, but the film is at least as interesting (and funny) for investigating the narcissism of artists and academics and gently spoofing their pretensions. Maggie’s Plan is a witty, low-key comedy of manners in a milieu Woody Allen thoroughly investigated in the late 20th century. But along with contemporary references, the story differs from Annie Hall or Manhattan by placing Maggie as the center of gravity. The romantic-sexual-intellectual landscape is shown from a woman’s point of view, a perspective Allen can be forgiven for not having.
Maggie’s Plan
Greta Gerwig
Ethan Hawke
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Rated R
